Related papers: Mirror actively deformed and regulated for applica…
In this paper, an opto-thermal analysis of a moderately heated lightweighted solar telescope mirror is carried out using 3D finite element analysis (FEA). A physically realistic heat transfer model is developed to account for the radiative…
Adaptive optics systems require a calibration procedure to operate, whether in closed loop or even more importantly in forward control. This calibration usually takes the form of an interaction matrix and is a measure of the response on the…
We present the design and fabrication of a miniaturized array of piezoelectrically actuated high speed Fresnel mirrors with individual mirror control. These Fresnel mirrors can be used to generate propagation invariant and self-healing…
The trend towards ever larger telescopes and more advanced adaptive optics systems is driving the need for deformable mirrors with a large number of low cost actuators. Liquid mirrors have long been recognized a potential low cost…
The lightweighting and surface accuracy targeted for NGST's 8 m primary mirror has been demonstrated in a 0.5 m prototype. Now a second, 2 m prototype weighing 40 kg in total is being fabricated at the University of Arizona under the NGST…
Commonly used wavefront sensors, the Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor and the pyramid wavefront sensor, for example, have large dynamic range or high sensitivity, trading one regime for the other. A new type of wavefront sensor is being…
All coronagraphic instruments for exoplanet high-contrast imaging need wavefront correction systems to reject optical aberrations and create sufficiently dark holes. Since the most efficient wavefront correction algorithms (controllers and…
We have built a 45-cm long x-ray deformable mirror of super-polished single-crystal silicon that has 45 actuators along the tangential axis. After assembly the surface height error was 19 nm rms. With use of high-precision visible-light…
The dynamical behavior of a nonlinear micromechanical resonator acting as one of the mirrors in an optical resonance cavity is investigated. The mechanical motion is coupled to the optical power circulating inside the cavity both directly…
We describe a method that uses total internal reflection at the water-air interface inside a large, transparent tank, to measure the interface's deflections. Using this configuration, we obtain an optical set-up where the liquid surface…
A shearing interferometer is presented which uses polarization control to shear the wavefront and to modulate the interference pattern. The shear is generated by spatial walk-off in a birefringent crystal. By adjusting the orientation of…
MOEMS Deformable Mirrors (DM) are key components for next generation instruments with innovative adaptive optics systems, in existing telescopes and in the future ELTs. These DMs must perform at room temperature as well as in cryogenic and…
Near-field radio holography is a common method for measuring and aligning mirror surfaces for millimeter and sub-millimeter telescopes. In instruments with more than a single mirror, degeneracies arise in the holography measurement,…
Performing linear operations using optical devices is a crucial building block in many fields ranging from telecommunication to optical analogue computation and machine learning. For many of these applications, key requirements are…
Exceptional pulse contrast can be critical for ultraintense laser experiments, particularly when using solid density targets, and their use is becoming widespread. However, current plasma mirror technology is becoming inadequate for the new…
All-dielectric optical metasurfaces can locally control the amplitude and phase of light at the nanoscale, enabling arbitrary wavefront shaping. However, lack of post-fabrication tunability has limited the true potential of metasurfaces for…
We present a new method to achieve high-contrast images using segmented and/or on-axis telescopes. Our approach relies on using two sequential Deformable Mirrors to compensate for the large amplitude excursions in the telescope aperture due…
Future large space telescopes will be equipped with adaptive optics (AO) to overcome wavefront aberrations and achieve high contrast for imaging faint astronomical objects, such as earth-like exoplanets and debris disks. In contrast to AO…
As the performance of coronagraphs improves, the achievable contrast is more and more dependent of the shape of the pupil. The future generation of space and ground based coronagraphic instruments will have to achieve high contrast levels…
Our work relates to the use of metamaterials engineered to realize a meta-surface approaching the exotic properties of an ideal object not observed in nature, a "magnetic mirror". Previous realizations were based on resonant structures…