Related papers: Characterizing deformable mirrors for the MagAO-X …
Advancements in high-efficiency hybrid variable reluctance (HVR) actuators are an enabling technology for building the next generation of large-format deformable mirrors, including adaptive secondary mirrors. The Netherlands Organization…
We report the experimental demonstration of tunable asymmetric acoustic metasurfaces with extreme contrast, made by two decorated membrane resonators (DMRs) coupled via a sealed air column. The front side of the metasurface is impedance…
The active reflector is one of the three main innovations of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). The deformation of such a huge spherically shaped reflector into different transient parabolic shapes is achieved…
We introduce wavefront shaping as a tool for optimizing the sensitivity in nano-optomechanical measurement schemes. We perform multimode output analysis of an optomechanical system consisting of a focused laser beam coupled to the…
One important frontier for astronomical adaptive optics (AO) involves methods such as Multi-Object AO and Multi-Conjugate AO that have the potential to give a significantly larger field of view than conventional AO techniques. A second key…
Light in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) spans wavelengths from 3-8 $\mu$m and is important to many applications such as gas sensing and thermal imaging. Due to materials challenges, there is currently a lack of mid-IR reconfigurable optical…
The Mid Infra Red Instrument (MIRI) is one of the four instruments onboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), providing imaging, coronagraphy and spectroscopy over the 5-28 microns band. To verify the optical performance of the…
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…
The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) is a new visible-wavelength testbed designed to advance the state of the art in wavefront control for high contrast imaging on large, segmented, ground-based telescopes. SEAL provides multiple options…
We present an adaptive lens which tunes its focal length with a glass membrane that is deformed by an integrated piezo bending actuator. A particular challenge in the fabrication of this type of actuator is the need to contact the…
In astronomy or biological imaging, refractive index inhomogeneities of e.g. atmosphere or tissues induce optical aberrations which degrade the desired information hidden behind the medium. A standard approach consists in measuring these…
Developing compact, broadband mid-infrared coherent sources for applications in spectroscopy and sensing remains a pressing challenge in photonics. However, material limitations and integration constraints have restricted the accessible…
We discuss the chosen concepts, detailed design, implementation and calibration of the 85-electrode adaptive optics (AO) system of the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope (SST), which was installed in 2013. The AO system is unusual by using a…
Dynamic wavefront aberrations negatively impact a wide range of optical applications including astronomy, optical free-space telecommunications and bio-imaging. Wavefront errors can be compensated by an adaptive optics system comprised of a…
This article describes the implementation of a focal plane based wavefront control loop on the high-contrast imaging instrument SCExAO (Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics). The sensor relies on the Fourier analysis of conventional…
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…
One of the main pursuits of the MagAO-X project is imaging planets around nearby stars with the direct detection method utilizing an extreme AO system and a coronagraph and a large telescope. The MagAO-X astronomical coronagraph will be…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique to improve the resolution of ground-based telescopes by correcting, in real-time, optical aberrations due to atmospheric turbulence and the telescope itself. With the rise of Giant Segmented Mirror…
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…
An adaptive optics system with a single deformable mirror is being implemented on the THEMIS 90cm solar telescope. This system is designed to operate in the visible and is required to be as robust as possible in order to deliver the best…