On-sky demonstration of stochastic speckle discrimination for companion detection with the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC)

We present an on-sky demonstration of a post-processing technique for companion detection called Stochastic Speckle Discrimination (SSD) and its ability to improve the detection of faint companions using SCExAO and the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC). Using this SSD technique, MEC is able to resolve companions at a comparable signal to noise to other integral field spectrographs solely utilizing photon arrival time information and without the use of any PSF subtraction techniques. SSD takes advantage of photon counting detectors, like the MKID detector found in MEC, to directly probe the photon arrival time statistics that describe the speckle field and allows us to identify and distinguish problematic speckles from companions of comparable brightness in an image. This technique is especially effective at close angular separations where the speckle intensity is large and where traditional post-processing techniques, like ADI, suffer.