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The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) 2.0: A reflective, multi-wavelength rebuild

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arxiv 2509.03770 v1 pith:SXETFG6L submitted 2025-09-03 astro-ph.IM

The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) 2.0: A reflective, multi-wavelength rebuild

classification astro-ph.IM
keywords testbedsealincludesadaptivecontrolcoronagraphcruzdesigned
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The Santa cruz Extreme Adaptive optics Lab (SEAL) is a visible/near-infrared wavelength testbed designed to support technology development for high contrast imaging on large, segmented, ground-based telescopes. SEAL saw first light in 2021 as a transmissive, visible-wavelength AO testbed. In this paper, we present four major upgrades to SEAL: (1) the testbed has been rebuilt with custom off-axis parabolic mirrors, enabling operation in both near-infrared and visible wavelengths; (2) the suite of wavefront sensors now includes a Shack-Hartmann, transmissive four-sided pyramid, vector-Zernike, and, in the muirSEAL testbed, a photonic lantern; (3) the testbed includes a vector-vortex coronagraph and will soon include a hybrid astrophotonic coronagraph; (4) in addition to its original Keck-heritage RTC, SEAL now includes two additional control software packages: Catkit, originally developed for the HiCAT testbed at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the RTC Compute And Control for Adaptive Optics (CACAO), originally designed for Subaru/SCExAO. We discuss the performance of the testbed after the reflective rebuild and on-going technology development work at SEAL.

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