Atmospheric turbulence generator: software and hardware implementation of Kolmogorov phase screen simulation system

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence causes refractive index fluctuations that introduce extra distortions to the wavefront of the propagated radiation. It degrades the resolution of the telescope for imaging applications and reduces the radiation power density in focusing applications. One of the possible ways of research the impact of the turbulence is to numerically simulate the spectrum of refractive index fluctuations, to reproduce it using a wavefront corrector and to measure the resultant wavefront using a Shack-Hartmann sensor. In this paper, we developed turbulence simulator software that generates the sequence of phase screens with Kolmogorov spectra. We reconstructed the generated set of phase screens using a stacked-actuator deformable mirror.