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

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 high precision phase reconstruction algorithm for multi-laser guide stars adaptive optics

Adaptive optics(AO) systems are widespread and considered as an essential part of any large aperture telescope for obtaining a high resolution imaging at present.To enlarge the imaging field of view(FOV),multi-laser guide stars(LGSs) are currently being investigated and used for the large aperture optical telescopes.LGS measurement is necessary and pivotal to obtain the cumulative phase distortion along a target in the multi-LGSs AO system.We propose a high precision phase reconstruction algorithm to estimate the phase for a target with an uncertain turbulence profile based on the interpolation.By comparing with the conventional average method,the proposed method reduces the root mean square(RMS) error from 130 nm to 85 nm with a 30% reduction for narrow FOV.We confirm that such phase reconstruction algorithm is validated for both narrow field AO and wide field AO.