Redundant apodization for direct imaging of exoplanets. II. Application to island effects

Telescope pupil fragmentation from spiders generates specific aberrations observed at various telescopes and expected on the large telescopes under construction. This so-called island effect induces differential pistons, tips and tilts on the pupil petals, deforming the instrumental PSF, and is one of the main limitations to the detection of exoplanets with high-contrast imaging. These aberrations have different origins such as the low-wind effect or petaling errors in the adaptive-optics reconstruction. In this paper, we propose to alleviate the impact of the aberrations induced by island effects on high-contrast imaging by adapting the coronagraph design in order to increase its robustness to petal-level aberrations. Following a method first developed for errors due to primary mirror segmentation (segment phasing errors, missing segments...), we develop and test Redundant Apodized Pupils (RAP), i.e. apodizers designed at the petal-scale, then duplicated and rotated to mimic the pupil petal geometry. We apply this concept to the ELT architecture, made of six identical petals, to yield a 10^-6 contrast in a dark region from 8 to 40lambda/D. Both amplitude and phase apodizers proposed in this paper are robust to differential pistons between petals, with minimal degradation to their coronagraphic PSFs and contrast levels. In addition, they are also more robust to petal-level tip-tilt errors than apodizers designed for the whole pupil, with which the limit of contrast of 10^-6 in the coronagraph dark zone is achieved for constraints up to 2 rad RMS of these petal-level modes. The RAP concept proves its robustness to island effects (low-wind effect and post-adaptive optics petaling), with an application to the ELT architecture. It can also be considered for other 8- to 30-meter class ground-based units such as VLT/SPHERE, Subaru/SCExAO, GMT/GMagAO-X, or TMT/PSI.