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International audience; To reach the full potential of the new generation of ground based telescopes, an extremely fine adjustment of the phase is required. Wavefront control and correction before detection has therefore become one of the cornerstones of instruments to achieve targeted performance, especially for high-contrast imaging. A crucial feature of accurate wavefront control leans on the wavefront sensor (WFS). We present a strategy to design new Fourier-Filtering WFS that encode the phase close from the fundamental photon efficiency limit. This strategy seems promising as it generates highly sensitive sensors suited for different pupil shape configurations.

Jets are rarely associated with pre-main-sequence intermediate-mass stars. Optical and near-IR observations of jet-driving sources are often hindered by the presence of a natal envelope. Jets around partly embedded sources are a useful diagnostic to constrain the geometry of the concealed protoplanetary disk. In fact, the jet-driving mechanisms are affected by both spatial anisotropies and episodic variations at the (sub-)au scale from the star. We obtained a rich set of high-contrast VLT/SPHERE observations from 0.6 micron to 2.2 micron of the young intermediate-mass star RY Tau. Given the proximity to the Sun of this source, our images have the highest spatial resolution ever obtained for an atomic jet. Optical observations in polarized light show no sign of the protoplanetary disk detected by ALMA. Instead, we observed a diffuse signal resembling a remnant envelope with an outflow cavity. The jet is detected in four spectral lines. The jet appears to be wiggling and its radial width increasing with the distance is complementary to the shape of the outflow cavity suggesting a strong jet/envelope interaction. Through the estimated tangential velocity, we revealed a possible connection between the launching time of the jet sub-structures and the stellar activity of RY Tau. RY Tau is at an intermediate stage toward the dispersal of the natal envelope. This source shows episodic increases of mass accretion/ejection similarly to other known intermediate-mass stars. The amount of observed jet wiggle is consistent with the presence of a precessing disk warp or misaligned inner disk that would be induced by an unseen planetary/sub-stellar companion at sub-/few-au scales. The high disk mass of RY Tau and of two other jet-driving intermediate-mass stars, HD163296 and MWC480, suggests that massive, full disks are more efficient at launching prominent jets., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication by A\&A

SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research) is a second generation VLT instrument aimed at the direct detection of exo-planets. It has received its first light in May 2014. ZIMPOL (Zurich Imaging Polarimeter) is the imaging polarimeter subsystem of the SPHERE instrument. It's capable of both high accuracy and high sensitivity polarimetry but can also be used as a classical imager. It is located behind an extreme AO system and a stellar coronagraph. ZIMPOL operates at visible wavelengths which is best suited to detect the very faint reflected and hence polarized visible light from extra solar planets. During the SPHERE fourth commissioning period (October 2014) we have made deep coronagraphic observations of the bright star alpha Gru (mR = 1.75) to assess the high contrast polarimetric performance of SPHERE-ZIMPOL. We have integrated on the target for a total time of about 45 minutes during the meridian transit in the Very Broad Band filter (600 - 900 nm) with a classical Lyot coronagraph with 3 λ/D radius focal mask. We reduce the data by a combination of Polarized Background subtraction, Polarimetric Differential Imaging (PDI) and Angular Differential Imaging (ADI). We reach contrasts of 10-6 and 10-7 at a radial distances of respectively 7 and 14 lambda/D from the PSF core. At these radial distances we are respectively a factor of 10 and 2 above the photon noise limit. We discuss our results by considering the temporal and spatial speckle behavior close to the PSF core in combination with low order polarimetric aberrations.

SPHERE is an extra-solar planet imager instrument for ESO's VLT telescope. Scheduled for first light in 2012, aims to detect giant extra-solar planet in the vicinity of bright stars and to characterise the objects found through spectroscopic and polarimetric observations. The observations will be done both within the Y, J, H and Ks atmospheric windows (~0.95 – 2.32μm) by the aid of a dual imaging camera (IRDIS) and an integral field spectrograph (IFS), and in the visible using a fast-modulating polarizing camera (ZIMPOL). The instrument employs an extreme-AO turbulence compensation system, focal plane tip-tilt correction, and interferential coronagraphs. The aim of this paper is to analyse the approach taken for system analysis and implementation in the light of forthcoming instruments of this type to be design and built for ELT-class telescopes.