Related papers: Keck Primary Mirror Closed-Loop Segment Control us…
The Thirty Meter Telescope will use a sophisticated adaptive optics system called NFIRAOS. This system utilizes two deformable mirrors conjugate to 0 km and 11.2 km to apply a Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) correction over a 2…
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…
Direct detection of exoplanets requires high dynamic range imaging. Coronagraphs could be the solution, but their performance in space is limited by wavefront errors (manufacturing errors on optics, temperature variations, etc.), which…
This paper deals with the theoretical principle and optical design of a phase-shifting telescope-interferometer. What is called a "Telescope-Interferometer" (T-I) is indeed a novel, recently proposed Wavefront Error (WFE) sensing technique,…
The ability to characterize exoplanets by spectroscopy of their atmospheres requires direct imaging techniques to isolate planet signal from the bright stellar glare. One of the limitations with the direct detection of exoplanets, either…
The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) is an instrument at the Keck II telescope that enables high-resolution spectroscopy of directly imaged exoplanets and substellar companions. KPIC uses single-mode fibers to couple the adaptive…
High contrast imaging (HCI) is fundamentally limited by wavefront aberrations, and the ability to perform wavefront sensing from focal plane images is key to reach the full potential of ground and space-based instruments. Vortex focal plane…
Precise alignment sensing and control are essential for maintaining the stability of laser interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. Conventional Wave Front Sensing technique (WFS), which relies on the beat between the carrier and…
The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) is a purpose-built instrument for high-dispersion coronagraphy in the K and L bands on Keck. This instrument will provide the first high resolution (R$>$30,000) spectra of known directly…
High-contrast imaging systems using active control with adaptive optics (AO) are often limited by non-common path (NCP) aberrations that are seen only at the final science image. AO systems employing focal-plane wavefront sensors (FP-WFSs)…
Laser guide star (LGS) wave-front sensing (LGSWFS) is a key element of tomographic adaptive optics system. However, when considering Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) scales, the LGS spot elongation becomes so large that it challenges the…
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 raw coronagraphic performance of current high-contrast imaging instruments is limited by the presence of a quasi-static speckle (QSS) background, resulting from instrumental non-common path errors (NCPEs). Rapid development of efficient…
The ingot WFS is a new kind of wavefront sensor specifically designed to deal with the elongation of LGS reference sources on ELT-class telescopes. Like the pyramid, it belongs to the family of pupil plane wavefront sensors and can be…
The implementation of a tuning fork sensor in a scanning force microscope operational at 300 mK is described and the harmonic oscillator model of the sensor is motivated. These sensors exhibit very high quality factors at low temperatures.…
Wavefront sensing in solar adaptive-optics is currently done with correlating Shack-Hartmann sensors, although the spatial- and temporal-resolutions of the phase measurements are then limited by the extremely fast computing required to…
Imaging exo-Earths is an exciting but challenging task because of the 10^-10 contrast ratio between these planets and their host star at separations narrower than 100 mas. Large segmented aperture space telescopes enable the sensitivity…
In space-based gravitational wave detection, the estimation of far-field wavefront error of the distorted beam is the precondition for the noise reduction. Zernike polynomials is used to describe the wavefront error of the transmitted…
This paper is the third part of a trilogy dealing with the principles, performance and limitations of what I named "Telescope-Interferometers" (TIs). The basic idea consists in transforming one telescope into a Wavefront Error (WFE) sensing…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique allowing to drastically improve ground-based telescopes angular resolution. The wavefront sensor (WFS) is one of the key components of such systems, driving the fundamental performance limitations. In…