Related papers: An all-photonic focal-plane wavefront sensor
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…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a powerful image correction technique with proven benefits for many life-science microscopy methods. However, the complexity of adding a reflective wavefront modulator and a wavefront sensor into already complicated…
Exoplanet direct imaging using adaptive optics (AO) is often limited by non-common path aberrations (NCPAs) and aberrations that are invisible to traditional pupil-plane wavefront sensors (WFSs). This can be remedied by focal-plane (FP)…
Two-wavelength adaptive optics (AO) systems sense turbulence-induced wavefront distortions using an artificial beacon or natural guidestar at one wavelength, while correcting and possibly transmitting at another. Although most existing AO…
In ground-based astronomy, Adaptive Optics (AO) is a pivotal technique, engineered to correct wavefront phase distortions and thereby enhance the quality of the observed images. Integral to an AO system is the wavefront sensor (WFS), which…
The direct imaging of an Earth-like exoplanet will require sub-nanometric wavefront control across large light-collecting apertures, to reject host starlight and detect the faint planetary signal. Current adaptive optics (AO) systems, which…
The effects of photon noise, aliasing, wavefront chromaticity and scintillation on the point spread function (PSF) contrast achievable with ground based adaptive optics (AO) are evaluated for different wavefront sensing schemes. I show that…
Adaptive optics systems are critical in any application where highly resolved imaging or beam control must be performed through a dynamic medium. Such applications include astronomy and free-space optical communications, where light…
Context. Solar wavefront sensing has been a challenge for astrophysical instrumentalists, due to the low contrast between the Sun and the sky background compared to night-time observations, which limits the performance of adaptive optics…
Here we present a laboratory analysis of the use of a 19-core photonic lantern (PL) in combination with neural network (NN) algorithms as an efficient focal plane wavefront sensor (FP-WFS) for adaptive optics (AO), measuring wavefront…
Astronomical adaptive optics (AO) is a critical approach to enable ground-based diffraction-limited imaging and high contrast science, with the potential to enable habitable exoplanet imaging on future extremely large telescopes. However,…
Advanced wavefront sensors (WFS) are essential for enabling new science cases for telescopes that utilize adaptive optics (AO) systems. While complex field WFS -- those that estimate the electric field phase and amplitude through…
The pyramid wavefront sensor (P-WFS) has replaced the Shack-Hartmann (SH-) WFS as sensor of choice for high performance adaptive optics (AO) systems in astronomy because of its flexibility in pupil sampling, its dynamic range, and its…
In astronomy and microscopy, distortions in the wavefront affect the dynamic range of a high contrast imaging system. These aberrations are either imposed by a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere, by static or thermal aberrations in the…
The limits for adaptive-optics (AO) imaging at high contrast and high resolution are determined by residual phase errors from non-common-path aberrations not sensed by the wavefront sensor, especially for integral field spectrographs, where…
The Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) is a concept belonging to the wide class Fourier-filtering wavefront sensor (FFWFS). The ZWFS is known for its extremely high sensitivity while having a low dynamic range, which makes it a unique sensor…
We report on a tapered three-core optical fibre that can be used as a tip-tilt wavefront sensor. In this device, a coupled region of a few millimetres at the sensing tip of the fibre converts fragile phase information from an incoming…
In the last two decades many people have been searching for the optimal wavefront sensor as it can boost the performance of high-contrast imagining by orders of magnitude on the ELTs. According classical information theory, the optimal…
State-of-the-art adaptive optics (AO) systems perform non-linear Fourier-type wavefront sensing for real-time corrections of dynamic wavefront aberrations. This general class of sensors uses a filtering mask in the focal plane that converts…
We present a promising approach to the extremely fast sensing and correction of small wavefront errors in adaptive optics systems. As our algorithm's computational complexity is roughly proportional to the number of actuators, it is…