Simulations of the extreme adaptive optics system for EPICS

EPICS is a project for a high contrast imaging instrument dedicated to direct imaging of exoplanets with the European Extremely Large Telescope. Its conceptual design study phase has finished at the early 2010, and we show here its end-to-end extreme adaptive optics simulation results. The simulations have been made using conventional, well-known but numerically intensive computation techniques (full Fourier diffraction model of a WFS and wavefront reconstruction with matrix-vector-multiplication). Many error sources important for XAO are considered: chromaticity effects, M1 segment mis-figure, pupil rotation, WFS misregistration, telescope jitter and spiders. The results confirm that a raw contrast of 10(-5) is reached at 20 mas, and 10(-7)-10(-6) at 200-500 mas. This is in agreement with our analytic estimations and EPICS top-level requirements.