Continuing To Advance European High Contrast Imaging Research And Development Towards HWO And LIFE

The European Research and Development for Space based High Contrast Imaging II Workshop, held at MPIA in May 2025, advanced Europe strategic coordination in support of future exoplanet imaging missions such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets mission.

Building on the first 2024 workshop, this meeting defined concrete priorities across eight technical areas, including wavefront sensing, coronagraphs, post processing, nulling interferometry, deformable mirrors, detectors, and telescope design.

Discussions emphasized Europe strengths in adaptive optics, ground-based facilities, and interferometry, while identifying key gaps, particularly the need for a dedicated European vacuum testbed for high contrast imaging.

The community highlighted near infrared or UV coronagraphy as a promising domain for European leadership and called for joint development of advanced data reduction algorithms, detectors, and cross-mission coordination with HWO and LIFE.

The workshop outcomes establish a collaborative roadmap to strengthen Europe technological readiness, foster agency partnerships, and ensure its continued leadership in the next generation of space-based exoplanet exploration.

Gael Chauvin, Oscar Carrion Gonzalez, Iva Laginja, Daniel Dicken, Sebastiaan Haffert, Markus Kasper, Olivier Absil, Jens Kammerer, Axel Potier, Herve Le Coroller, Elisabeth Matthews, Romain Laugier, Denis Defrere, Jonah Hansen, Oliver Krause, Pieter de Visser, Mikael Karlsson, Thomas Henning, Marc Ferrari, Jonas Kuehn, Markus Janson, Feng Zhao, Celia Desgrange

Comments: 29 pages, no figures, European R&D for Space-based High-Contrast Imaging II Workshop summary report
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2604.15077 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2604.15077v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15077
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Submission history
From: Gael Chauvin
[v1] Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:40:59 UTC (85 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15077

Astrobiology, Astronomy,