Beam shaping for laser-based adaptive optics in astronomy.

The availability and performance of laser-based adaptive optics (AO) systems are strongly dependent on the power and quality of the laser beam before being projected to the sky. Frequent and time-consuming alignment procedures are usually required in the laser systems with free-space optics to optimize the beam. Despite these procedures, significant distortions of the laser beam have been observed during the first two years of operation of the Gemini South multi-conjugate adaptive optics system (GeMS). A beam shaping concept with two deformable mirrors is investigated in order to provide automated optimization of the laser quality for astronomical AO. This study aims at demonstrating the correction of quasi-static aberrations of the laser, in both amplitude and phase, testing a prototype of this two-deformable mirror concept on GeMS. The paper presents the results of the preparatory study before the experimental phase. An algorithm to control amplitude and phase correction, based on phase retrieval techniques, is presented with a novel unwrapping method. Its performance is assessed via numerical simulations, using aberrations measured at GeMS as reference. The results predict effective amplitude and phase correction of the laser distortions with about 120 actuators per mirror and a separation of 1.4 m between the mirrors. The spot size is estimated to be reduced by up to 15% thanks to the correction. In terms of AO noise level, this has the same benefit as increasing the photon flux by 40%.

Mitigation of vibrations in adaptive optics by minimization of closed-loop residuals.

We describe a new technique to reduce tip and tilt vibrations via the design of adaptive optics controllers in a frequency framework. The method synthesizes controllers by minimizing an H2 norm of the tip and tilt residuals. In this approach, open loop slopes (pseudo-open-loop) are reconstructed from on-sky data and input into off-line simulations of the adaptive optics system. The proposed procedure executes a sequence of off-line closed-loop runs with increasing controller complexity and searches for the controller that minimizes the variance of residuals. Although the method avoids any identification of the vibration and turbulence models during the controller synthesis, the actual models are indirectly constructed as a by-product of the H2 norm minimization. The technique has been implemented on and tested with two operational instruments, namely Paranal's NACO and Gemini-South's GeMS, showing an effective rejection of the main vibrations in the loop and also improving the overall performance of the system over varying turbulence conditions. It is shown that a superior performance is obtained when compared to the standard integrator controller.

Comparison of vibration mitigation controllers for adaptive optics systems.

Vibrations are detrimental to the performance of modern adaptive optics (AO) systems. In this paper, we describe new methods tested to mitigate the vibrations encountered in some of the instruments of the Gemini South telescope. By implementing a spectral analysis of the slope measurements from several wavefront sensors and an imager, we can determine the frequencies and magnitude of these vibrations. We found a persistent vibration at 55 Hz with others occurring occasionally at 14 and 100 Hz. Two types of AO controllers were designed and implemented, Kalman and H∞, in the multiconjugate AO tip-tilt loop. The first results show a similar performance for these advanced controllers and a clear improvement in vibration rejection and overall performance over the classical integrator scheme. It is shown that the reduction in the standard deviation of the residual slopes (as measured by wavefront sensors) is highly dependent on turbulence, wind speed, and vibration conditions, ranging--in terms of slopes RMS value--from an almost negligible reduction for high speed wind to a factor of 5 for a combination of low wind and strong vibrations.

Using artificial neural networks for open-loop tomography.

Modern adaptive optics (AO) systems for large telescopes require tomographic techniques to reconstruct the phase aberrations induced by the turbulent atmosphere along a line of sight to a target which is angularly separated from the guide sources that are used to sample the atmosphere. Multi-object adaptive optics (MOAO) is one such technique. Here, we present a method which uses an artificial neural network (ANN) to reconstruct the target phase given off-axis references sources. We compare our ANN method with a standard least squares type matrix multiplication method and to the learn and apply method developed for the CANARY MOAO instrument. The ANN is trained with a large range of possible turbulent layer positions and therefore does not require any input of the optical turbulence profile. It is therefore less susceptible to changing conditions than some existing methods. We also exploit the non-linear response of the ANN to make it more robust to noisy centroid measurements than other linear techniques.

Modeling a MEMS deformable mirror using non-parametric estimation techniques.

Using non-parametric estimation techniques, we have modeled an area of 126 actuators of a micro-electro-mechanical deformable mirror with 1024 actuators. These techniques produce models applicable to open-loop adaptive optics, where the turbulent wavefront is measured before it hits the deformable mirror. The model's input is the wavefront correction to apply to the mirror and its output is the set of voltages to shape the mirror. Our experiments have achieved positioning errors of 3.1% rms of the peak-to-peak wavefront excursion.

Deformable mirror model for open-loop adaptive optics using multivariate adaptive regression splines.

Open-loop adaptive optics is a technique in which the turbulent wavefront is measured before it hits the deformable mirror for correction. We present a technique to model a deformable mirror working in open-loop based on multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), a non-parametric regression technique. The model's input is the wavefront correction to apply to the mirror and its output is the set of voltages to shape the mirror. We performed experiments with an electrostrictive deformable mirror, achieving positioning errors of the order of 1.2% RMS of the peak-to-peak wavefront excursion. The technique does not depend on the physical parameters of the device; therefore it may be included in the control scheme of any type of deformable mirror.

Shack-Hartmann sensor improvement using optical binning.

We present a design improvement for a recently proposed type of Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor that uses a cylindrical (lenticular) lenslet array. The improved sensor design uses optical binning and requires significantly fewer detector pixels than the corresponding conventional or cylindrical Shack-Hartmann sensor, and so detector readout noise causes less signal degradation. Additionally, detector readout time is significantly reduced, which reduces the latency for closed loop systems and data processing requirements. We provide simple analytical noise considerations and Monte Carlo simulations, we show that the optically binned Shack-Hartmann sensor can offer better performance than the conventional counterpart in most practical situations, and our design is particularly suited for use with astronomical adaptive optics systems.