Extrasolar Planets
My work so far has been focused on the development of techniques that will someday provide direct images and spectra of planets orbiting other stars than our good old Sun.
From the ground, taking such images is an interesting challenge, that requires Adaptive Optics (AO) running fast enough to correct the effects of the ever changing atmosphere and provide crisp, diffraction limited images of stars and their immediate neighborhood. AO systems have been up for almost two decades, and provided us with fantastic images of planetary surfaces within our Solar system as well as a handful of extrasolar planetary systems. The coming generation of extreme AO systems basically aims at doing the same thing, but better, with more actuators and faster! One such system is the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme AO system which I have the pleasure of assembling and testing with the help of a great team.
After that, it's all about variants of fundamental optical techniques: coronagraphy and interferometry, or sometimes even a combination of both.