Configuration optimization of laser guide stars and wavefront correctors for multi-conjugation adaptive optics

Abstract

Multi-conjugation adaptive optics (MCAOs) have been investigated and used in the large aperture optical telescopes for high-resolution imaging with large field of view (FOV). The atmospheric tomographic phase reconstruction and projection of three-dimensional turbulence volume onto wavefront correctors, such as deformable mirrors (DMs) or liquid crystal wavefront correctors (LCWCs), is a very important step in the data processing of an MCAO's controller. In this paper, a method according to the wavefront reconstruction performance of MCAO is presented to evaluate the optimized configuration of multi laser guide stars (LGSs) and the reasonable conjugation heights of LCWCs. Analytical formulations are derived for the different configurations and are used to generate optimized parameters for MCAO. Several examples are given to demonstrate our LGSs configuration optimization method. Compared with traditional methods, our method has minimum wavefront tomographic error, which will be helpful to get higher imaging resolution at large FOV in MCAO.

A slope-based decoupling algorithm to simultaneously control dual deformable mirrors in a woofer–tweeter adaptive optics system

“…Adaptive optics is a very efficient technology used to correct the wave-front aberration, so it has been successfully used in the laser beam shaping systems, telescopes, and vision instruments. [1][2][3] However, to achieve better correction performance, adaptive optics system should compensate both loworder and high-order wave-front aberration simultaneously. Though many researchers have done a lot of study about large stroke and high spatial frequency deformable mirror (DM), the application of this DM still need solve many technological problems.…”