WAVEFRONT SENSING TECHNOLOGY FOR ADAPTIVE OPTICAL SYSTEMS

Remote sensing through atmospheric turbulence had been hard works for a long time, because wavefront distortion due to the Earth's atmospheric turbulence deteriorates image quality. But due to the appearance of adaptive optics, it is no longer difficult things. Adaptive optics is the technology to correct random optical wavefront distortions in real time. For past three decades, research on adaptive optics has been performed actively. Currently, most of newly built telescopes have adaptive optical systems. Adaptive optical system is typically composed of three parts, wavefront sensing, wavefront correction and control. In this work, the wavefront sensing technology for adaptive optical system is treated. More specifically, shearing interferometers and Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors are considered. Both of them are zonal wavefront sensors and measure the slope of a wavefront. . In this study, the shearing interferometer is made up of four right-angle prisms, whose relative sliding motions provide the lateral shearing and phase shifts necessary for wavefront measurement. Further, a special phase-measuring least-squares algorithm is adopted to compensate for the phase-shifting error caused by the variation in the thickness of the index-matching oil between the prisms. Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors are widely used in adaptive optics for wavefront sensing. It uses an array of identical positive lenslets. And each lenslet acts as a subaperture and produces spot image. Distortion of an input wavefront changes the location of spot image. And the slope of a wavefront is obtained by measuring this relative deviation of spot image. Structures and measuring algorithms of each sensor will be presented. Also, the results of wavefront measurement will be given. Using these wavefront sensing technology, an adaptive optical system will be built in the future.