Speckle Decorrelation and Dynamic Range in Speckle Noise Limited Imaging

The useful dynamic range of an image in the diffraction limited regime is usually limited by speckles caused by residual phase errors in the optical system forming the image. The technique of speckle decorrelation involves introducing many independent realizations of additional phase error into a wavefront during one speckle lifetime, changing the instantaneous speckle pattern. A commonly held assumption is that this results in the speckles being ‘moved around’ at the rate at which the additional phase screens are applied. The intention of this exercise is to smooth the speckles out into a more uniform background distribution during their persistence time, thereby enabling companion detection around bright stars to be photon noise limited rather than speckle-limited. We demonstrate analytically why this does not occur, and confirm this result with numerical simulations. We show that the original speckles must persist, and that the technique of speckle decorrelation merely adds more noise to the original speckle noise, thereby degrading the dynamic range of the image. Subject headings: instrumentation: adaptive optics — methods: analytical — methods: numerical — space vehicles: instruments — techniques: image processing