液晶自适应光学的研究进展

概述了中科院长春光学精密机械与物理研究所(长春光机所)在液晶自适应光学方面的研究进展。针对液晶自适应光学技术存在的能量利用率低和校正频率慢的两大国际难题,液晶自适应光学研究组采取了一系列有效措施,不但攻克了能量利用率低的难题,且在校正频率方面也取得了质的飞跃。目前,系统能量利用率已从最初的5%提高到85%,基本和变形镜自适应光学系统的能量利用率相当;校正频率也从5 Hz提高到140 Hz,接近了校正大气湍流的实用化水平。利用该研究成果,分别研制了针对中科院国家天文台2.16 m望远镜和长春光机所1.2 m望远镜的液晶自适应光学系统并对恒星进行了有效校正,使1.2 m望远镜对恒星的分辨能力提高至约3倍衍射极限。

Recent progress in liquid crystal adaptive optical techniques

Advances in Liquid Crystal Adaptive Optical Systems(LC AOS) are described for Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences(CIOMP, CAS) in this paper. For two bottlenecks of low energy utilization ratio and slow correction frequency in LC AOS problems, a series of effective methods are presented by the LC AOS working group. The low energy utilization ratio has been improved from 5% to 85%, which is similar to that of the deformable mirror based AOSs. Furthermore, the correction frequency of the LC AOS is also greatly improved from 5 Hz to 140 Hz, which is closed to the ability of correction for atmospheric turbulence. According to these research results, two LC AOSs which correspond to a 2.16 meter Telescope(located at Xinglong Station of Beijing Astronomical Observatory) and a 1.2 meter telescope(located at CIOMP, CAS) are designed to correct the stars. Obtained results show that the resolution ability of the star for the 1.2 meter telescope is up to 3 times of the diffraction limitation.