UC Santa Barbara

The Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) Exoplanet Camera (MEC) is a Y-J band integral field unit located behind the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics system (SCExAO) at the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea. The detector inside of MEC is a 20 kilo-pixel photon-counting MKID array that yields not only the energy of each photon (R~5), but also its arrival time (to within a microsecond) with no read noise or dark current. This temporal resolution allows us to perform post-processing techniques that leverage differences in the photon arrival time statistics between stars and their faint companions such as Stochastic Speckle Discrimination (SSD). With SSD, we have demonstrated the ability to uncover low mass stellar companions with the discovery of HIP 109427 B and also obtained the first SSD detection of a diffuse source using MEC observations of the known disk AB Aurigae. Here we can resolve structures in the disk within 0.3” without the use of any PSF subtraction or polarization. These analyses are made possible through the use of the MKID Pipeline, a new open-source data reduction and analysis pipeline developed for MKID instruments that takes raw MKID data as its input and can return not only unique MKID data products for specialized analysis, but also images that can easily interface with existing post-processing techniques (e.g. ADI) for more general science.

This thesis first presents an introduction to high-contrast imaging, the MEC instrument, and photon statistics in millisecond images behind an Adaptive Optics system. We then introduce the MKID Pipeline which is the open source MKID Data Reduction and Analysis Software developed for MEC with extensibility to future MKID instruments. Using the MKID Pipeline, we then present the first science results with SCExAO/MEC with the discovery of HIP 109427 B using SSD with MEC as well as high resolution spectroscopy with the CHARIS instrument. We end with a broader discussion of how MKID instruments, like MEC, are uniquely positioned to explore photon statistics at very fast frame rates and provide a path forward for future researchers to understand and utilize the unique capabilities of MKID cameras.