Related papers: Focus diverse phase retrieval testbed development …
The ESA Gaia spacecraft has two Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors (WFS) on its focal plane. They are required to refocus the telescope in-orbit due to launch settings and gravity release. They require bright stars to provide good signal to…
Optical beams and starlight distorted by atmospheric turbulence can be corrected with adaptive optics systems to enable efficient coupling into single-mode fibers. Deformable mirrors, used to flatten the wavefront in astronomical…
Conventional methods of wavefront reconstruction from the raw data of the Shack-Hartmann sensor use the focal spot shifts and discard the high-frequency information about the wavefront. Phase-retrieval-based methods treat the Hartmann…
In this manuscript we demonstrate a method to reconstruct the wavefront of focused beams from a measured diffraction pattern behind a diffracting mask in real-time. The phase problem is solved by means of a neural network, which is trained…
In astronomy, upcoming space telescopes with wide-field optical instruments have a spatially varying point spread function (PSF). Specific scientific goals require a high-fidelity estimation of the PSF at target positions where no direct…
The performance of high-contrast imaging instruments is limited by wavefront errors, in particular by non-common path aberrations (NCPAs). Focal-plane wavefront sensing (FPWFS) is appropriate to handle NCPAs because it measures the…
Iterative phase retrieval algorithms are widely used in digital optics for their efficiency and simplicity. Conventionally, these algorithms do not consider aberrations as they assume an ideal, aberration-free optical system. Here, we…
Optical distortions can significantly deteriorate the measurement accuracy in imaging systems. Such distortions can occur at fluctuating phase boundaries as well as multiple-phase flows and result from the accompanied refractive index…
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.…
To reach the full potential of the new generation of ground based telescopes, an extremely fine adjustment of the phase is required. Wavefront control and correction before detection has therefore become one of the cornerstones of…
The nonlinear curvature wavefront sensor (nlCWFS) offers improved sensitivity for adaptive optics (AO) systems compared to existing wavefront sensors, such as the Shack-Hartmann. The nominal nlCWFS design uses a series of imaging planes…
The correction of quasi-static wavefront errors within a coronagraphic optical system will be a key challenge to overcome in order to directly image exoplanets in reflected light. These quasi-static errors are caused by mid to high-order…
The family of multi-plane phase retrieval sensors, such as the curvature and nonlinear curvature wavefront sensors (WFS), contain tip/tilt information embedded in their signals. We have built a nonlinear curvature WFS to study different…
Wavefront sensors encode phase information of an incoming wavefront into an intensity pattern that can be measured on a camera. Several kinds of wavefront sensors (WFS) are used in astronomical adaptive optics. Amongst them, Fourier-based…
We propose a novel approach and algorithm based on two preliminary tests of the optical system elements to enhance the super-resolved complex-valued imaging. The approach is developed for inverse phase imaging in a single-shot lensless…
For segmented telescopes, achieving fine co-focus adjustment is essential for realizing co-phase adjustment and maintenance, which involves adjusting the millimeter-scale piston between segments to fall within the capture range of the…
The Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor is widely used to measure aberrations induced by atmospheric turbulence in adaptive optics systems. However if there exists strong atmospheric turbulence or the brightness of guide stars is low, the…
Point Spread Function (PSF) engineering is used in single emitter localization to measure the emitter position in 3D and possibly other parameters such as the emission color or dipole orientation as well. Advanced PSF models such as spline…
Wavefront sensors have now become core components in the fields of metrology of optical systems, biomedical optics, and adaptive optics systems for astronomy. However, none of the designs used or proposed so far achieve simultaneously a…
Exoplanet detection and characterization through extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) is a key science goal of future extremely large telescopes. This achievement, however, will be limited in sensitivity by both quasi-static wavefront errors and…