Limitation of the Pupil Replication Technique in the Presence of Instrumental Defects

Pupil replication has been proposed by Greenaway et al. as a new optical technique to improve the suppression of starlight in high dynamic imaging. This Letter extends numerical simulations in the two-dimensional case with various realistic imperfections (surface error, chromatic smearing, and pupil shift). These results demonstrate some strong limitations compared to single-pupil apodization techniques for exoplanet detection.