Laboratory testing of multi-star wavefront control with a coronagraph

We present the continued progress and laboratory results advancing the technology readiness of Multi-Star Wavefront Control (MSWC), a method to directly image planets and disks in multi-star systems such as Alpha Centauri. Because of the ubiquity of multistar systems, this method increases the science yield of many missions and concepts such as WFIRST, HabEx, LUVOIR, and potentially enables the detection of Earth-like planets (if they exist) around our nearest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri. We report on lab demonstrations of MSWC, including one at the Ames Coronagraph Experiment (ACE) laboratory, as well as with the SCExAO instrument. Our demonstrations include both sub- and super-Nyquist versions of MSWC, showing that active suppression of light from a binary is possible even when the star separation exceeds the outer outer working angle of the deformable mirror. We also use standard single-star speckle suppression techniques to isolate and quantify the gains of MSWC.