An all-photonic focal-plane wavefront sensor

Abstract

Adaptive optics (AO) is critical in modern astronomy, as well as in optical communications and remote sensing, to deal with the rapid blurring caused by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere. But even the best AO systems are limited by their wavefront sensors, which need to be in an optical plane non-common to the science image, unavoidably leading to errors that limit the reach of current astronomy. They are also insensitive to certain wavefront-error modes, and are poorly suited to injecting light into single-mode optical fibres, important for applications such as high-resolution spectroscopy of extra-solar planets. Here we present a new type of wavefront sensor based on a photonic lantern fibre-mode-converter and deep learning. This new wavefront sensor can be placed at the same focal plane as the science image, and is also optimal for single-mode fibre injection. By only measuring the intensities of an array of single-mode outputs, both phase and amplitude information on the incident wavefront can be reconstructed. We demonstrate the concept with both simulations and an experimental realisation of this novel wavefront sensor, wherein Zernike wavefront errors are recovered from focal-plane measurements to a precision of 2.6 × 10 −5 radians mean-squared-error.