No abstract available

[en] The use of adaptive optics was originally conceived by astronomers seeking to correct the blurring of images made with large telescopes due to the effects of atmospheric turbulence. The basic idea is to use a device, a wave front corrector, to adjust the phase of light passing through an optical system, based on some measurement of the spatial variation of the phase transverse to the light propagation direction, using a wave front sensor. Although the original concept was intended for application to astronomical imaging, the technique can be more generally applied. For instance, adaptive optics systems have been used for several decades to correct for aberrations in high-power laser systems. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the world's largest laser system, the National Ignition Facility, uses adaptive optics to correct for aberrations in each of the 192 beams, all of which must be precisely focused on a millimeter scale target in order to perform nuclear physics experiments

[en] Adaptive optics can be used to correct the aberrations in the human eye caused by imperfections in the cornea and the lens and thereby, improve image quality both looking into and out of the eye. Under the auspices of the NSF Center for Adaptive Optics and the DOE Biomedical Engineering Program, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has joined together with leading vision science researchers around the country to develop and test new ophthalmic imaging systems using novel wavefront corrector technologies. Results of preliminary comparative evaluations of these technologies in initial system tests show promise for future clinical utility

[en] The objective of this project was to demonstrate the use of multiple distributed deformable mirrors (DMs) to improve the performance of optical systems with distributed aberrations. This concept is expected to provide dramatic improvement in the optical performance of systems in applications where the aberrations are distributed along the optical path or within the instrument itself. Our approach used multiple actuated DMs distributed to match the aberration distribution. The project developed the algorithms necessary to determine the required corrections and simulate the performance of these multiple DM systems

[en] Any adaptive optics system must be calibrated with respect to internal aberrations in order for it to properly correct the starlight before it enters the science camera. Typical internal calibration consists of using a point source stimulus at the input to the AO system and recording the wavefront at the output. Two methods for such calibration have been implemented on the adaptive optics system at Lick Observatory. The first technique, Phase Diversity, consists of taking out of focus images with the science camera and using an iterative algorithm to estimate the system wavefront. A second technique uses a newly installed instrument, the Phase-Shifting Diffraction Interferometer, which has the promise of providing very high accuracy wavefront measurements. During observing campaigns in 1998, both of these methods were used for initial calibrations. In this paper we present results and compare the two methods in regard to accuracy and their practical aspects

[en] Nearly every new large-scale laser system application at LLNL has requirements for beam control which exceed the current level of available technology. For applications such as inertial confinement fusion, laser isotope separation, laser machining, and laser the ability to transport significant power to a target while maintaining good beam quality is critical. There are many ways that laser wavefront quality can be degraded. Thermal effects due to the interaction of high-power laser or pump light with the internal optical components or with the ambient gas are common causes of wavefront degradation. For many years, adaptive optics based on thing deformable glass mirrors with piezoelectric or electrostrictive actuators have be used to remove the low-order wavefront errors from high-power laser systems. These adaptive optics systems have successfully improved laser beam quality, but have also generally revealed additional high-spatial-frequency errors, both because the low-order errors have been reduced and because deformable mirrors have often introduced some high-spatial-frequency components due to manufacturing errors. Many current and emerging laser applications fall into the high-resolution category where there is an increased need for the correction of high spatial frequency aberrations which requires correctors with thousands of degrees of freedom. The largest Deformable Mirrors currently available have less than one thousand degrees of freedom at a cost of approximately $1M. A deformable mirror capable of meeting these high spatial resolution requirements would be cost prohibitive. Therefore a new approach using a different wavefront control technology is needed. One new wavefront control approach is the use of liquid-crystal (LC) spatial light modulator (SLM) technology for the controlling the phase of linearly polarized light. Current LC SLM technology provides high-spatial-resolution wavefront control, with hundreds of thousands of degrees of freedom, more than two orders of magnitude greater than the best Deformable Mirrors currently made. Even with the increased spatial resolution, the cost of these devices is nearly two orders of magnitude less than the cost of the largest deformable mirror

[en] The resolution of ground-based telescopes is typically limited to ∼1 second of arc because of the blurring effects of atmospheric turbulence. Adaptive optics (AO) technology senses and corrects for the optical distortions due to turbulence hundreds of times per second using high-speed sensors, computers, deformable mirror, and laser technology. The goal of this project is to make AO systems widely useful astronomical tools providing resolutions up to an order of magnitude better than current, ground-based telescopes. Astronomers at the University of California Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton now routinely use the LLNL developed AO system for high resolution imaging of astrophysical objects. We report here on the instrument development progress and on the science observations made with this system during this 3-year ERI project

[en] An adaptive optical system used to correct horizontal beam propagation paths has been demonstrated. This system utilizes an interferometric wave-front sensor and a large-actuator-number MEMS-based spatial light modulator to correct the aberrations incurred by the beam after propagation along the path. Horizontal path correction presents a severe challenge to adaptive optics systems due to the short atmospheric transverse coherence length and the high degree of scintillation incurred by laser propagation along these paths. Unlike wave-front sensors that detect phase gradients, however, the interferometric wave-front sensor measures the wrapped phase directly. Because the system operates with nearly monochromatic light and uses a segmented spatial light modulator, it does not require that the phase be unwrapped to provide a correction and it also does not require a global reconstruction of the wave-front to determine the phase as required by gradient detecting wave-front sensors. As a result, issues with branch points are eliminated. Because the atmospheric probe beam is mixed with a large amplitude reference beam, it can be made to operate in a photon noise limited regime making its performance relatively unaffected by scintillation. The MEMS-based spatial light modulator in the system contains 1024 pixels and is controlled to speeds in excess of 800 Hz, enabling its use for correction of horizontal path beam propagation. In this article results are shown of both atmospheric characterization with the system and open loop horizontal path correction of a 1.53 micron laser by the system. To date Strehl ratios of greater than 0.5 have been achieved

[en] The CEA-DAM attaches great importance to the control of the measurements it carries out, including for the detection of nuclear tests by geophysical methods. After the design of the first sensors in the late fifties, the various elements of the measurement chains were progressively improved, especially in the field of infrasonic acoustics during the construction of the International Monitoring System (IMS) of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban treaty (CTBT). The research and development activities carried out in recent years have led, on the one hand, to sensors whose intrinsic noise is significantly lower than the ambient acoustic noises in the most quiet places in the world, and on the other hand to systems that significantly reduce the noise generated by the wind, and to tools for evaluating the performance of a measurement network in order to optimally position the stations on the globe. The ongoing introduction of optical technologies and the growth of metrology activities open up interesting prospects. (authors)

[en] Ground based adaptive optics is a potentially powerful technique for direct imaging detection of extrasolar planets. Turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere imposes some fundamental limits, but the large size of ground-based telescopes compared to spacecraft can work to mitigate this. We are carrying out a design study for a dedicated ultra-high-contrast system, the eXtreme Adaptive Optics Planet Imager (XAOPI), which could be deployed on an 8-10m telescope in 2007. With a 4096-actuator MEMS deformable mirror it should achieve Strehl >0.9 in the near-IR. Using an innovative spatially filtered wavefront sensor, the system will be optimized to control scattered light over a large radius and suppress artifacts caused by static errors. We predict that it will achieve contrast levels of 10⁷-10⁸ at angular separations of 0.2-0.8 inches around a large sample of stars (R<7-10), sufficient to detect Jupiter-like planets through their near-IR emission over a wide range of ages and masses. We are constructing a high-contrast AO testbed to verify key concepts of our system, and present preliminary results here, showing an RMS wavefront error of <1.3 nm with a flat mirror