High quality achromatic VVWs that allow high contrast modulation of light beams have important applications in many fields of optics and photonics, including optical tweezers, image processing, phase contrast microscopy, electro-optical and all-optical switching and information displays.
The new generation coronagraphy systems will be of interest for many, small or large, astronomical instruments and observatories, including Palomar observatory, the Very Large Telescope in Chile (ESO), Keck telescope, Large Binocular telescope, European-ELT and the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT). A number of Government projects will greatly benefit using these components, among them the ACCESS (Actively Corrected Coronagraph for Exoplanet Space Studies, JPL) and its European equivalent SEE-COAST (Super-Earth Explorer- Coronagraphic off-axis Space Telescope, Observatory of Paris); and the TPF-C (Terrestrial Planet Finder-Coronagraph), one of the most ambitious NASA projects to detect and characterize Earth-like planets.
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