Getting ready to commission Gemini Planet Imager 2.0 at the Gemini North Observatory

High contrast imaging (HCI) technique can be used to characterize exoplanets by spectroscopy of their atmospheres. Coronagraphs are required to suppress the diffraction effects by blocking the starlight however residual wavefront error scatters starlight in the science images and masks out signals from exoplanets. The performance of HCI is thus contingent upon how efficiently the wavefront aberrations are minimized.
 
Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is an HCI instrument, which during its six years of operation at Gemini South detected and spectrally characterized self-luminous gas-giant exoplanets (>1MJup) in wide orbits (>10AU) and also resolved circumstellar disks around young, nearby stars. However, GPI suffered from speckle noise which is quasi-static and chromatic in nature, thus setting limits on the achievable post-processed contrast (~10^-6, indicating how much fainter a planet is relative to a star that could be detected). The upgrade of GPI (dubbed “GPI2.0”), which will be operational at Gemini North in ~2024, is aiming to improve the contrast by a factor of 10 to 100 at small angular separations, enabling the detection of Jovian-like exoplanets and mature gas planets in closer orbits. In this presentation, I will discuss the basics of HCI and the proposed upgrades and the expected scientific yield of GPI2.0 at Gemini North.