Related papers: Development of a Miniaturized Deformable Mirror Co…
The advent of extremely large telescopes will bring unprecedented light-collecting power and spatial resolution, but it will also lead to a significant increase in the size and complexity of focal-plane instruments. The use of freeform…
The Very Large Telescope Interferometer Auxiliary Telescopes will soon be equipped with an adaptive optics system called NAOMI. The corrective optics deformable mirror is the commercial DM241 from ALPAO. Being part of an interferometer…
Sensitivity and resolution of space telescopes are directly related to the size of the primary mirror. Enabling such future extremely large space telescopes or even arrays of those will require to drastically reduce the areal weight of the…
Recently, Adaptive Secondary Mirrors showed excellent on-sky results in the Near Infrared wavelengths. They currently provide 30mm inter-actuator spacing and about 1 kHz bandwidth. Pushing these devices to be operated at visible wavelengths…
It is widely believed that adaptive optics only has a role in correcting turbulent wavefronts on large telescopes using very bright reference stars. Unfortunately these are very scarce and many astronomical targets require wavefront…
High-contrast imaging and spectroscopy provide unique constraints for exoplanet formation models as well as for planetary atmosphere models. Instrumentation techniques in this field have greatly improved over the last two decades, with the…
Coronagraph instruments on future space telescopes will enable the direct detection and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars for the first time. The quest for the optimal optical coronagraph designs has made rapid…
We present the motivation and early tests for a novel solar instrument that will harness the new High Efficiency Pixel (HEP) Texas Instruments DLP801RE Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) as a reconfigurable spatial light modulator. This…
(abridged) Extreme adaptive optics (XAO) encounters severe difficulties to cope with the high speed (>1kHz), high accuracy and high order requirements for future extremely large telescopes. An innovative high order adaptive optics system…
Directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets (``exoEarths'') with a coronagraph instrument on a space telescope requires a stable wavefront with optical path differences limited to tens of picometers RMS during exposure times of a few hours.…
Extreme wavefront correction is required for coronagraphs on future space telescopes to reach 1e-8 or better starlight suppression for the direct imaging and characterization of exoplanets in reflected light. Thus, a suite of wavefront…
A Deformable Mirror (DM) is an important component of an Adaptive Optics system. It is known that an on-axis spherical/parabolic optical component, placed at an angle to the incident beam introduces defocus as well as astigmatism in the…
Carbon fibre composite technology for lightweight mirrors is gaining increasing interest in the space- and ground-based astronomical communities for its low weight, ease of manufacturing, excellent thermal qualities and robustness. We…
Traditional glass-based optics are typically optimized for narrow spectral bands, such as the visible (400-700nm) or shortwave infrared (1000-1800nm). While the emergence of VIS-SWIR sensors (400-1700nm) offers transformative potential,…
Achieving high-precision light manipulation is crucial for delivering information through complex media with high fidelity. However, existing spatial light modulation devices face a fundamental tradeoff between speed and accuracy. Digital…
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…
We have developed X-ray telescope mirrors using an original electroforming replication technique established through the fabrication of millimeter-aperture, ultra-short-focal-length nanofocusing mirrors for synchrotron X-ray microscopy.…
Over the last two decades, spatial light modulators (SLMs) have revolutionised our ability to shape optical fields. They grant independent dynamic control over thousands of degrees-of-freedom within a single light beam. In this work we test…
We present the conceptual design and initial development of the Hysteretic Deformable Mirror (HDM). The HDM is a completely new approach to the design and operation of deformable mirrors for wavefront correction in advanced imaging systems.…
Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) is essential for increasing the corrected Field-of-View (FoV) in astronomical imaging and potentially for free-space optical communications, particularly for small-aperture, transportable systems. We…