Actuators of 3-element unimorph deformable mirror

Abstract

Kinds of wavefront aberrations exist among optical systems because of atmosphere disturbance, device displacement and a variety of thermal effects, which disturb the information of transmitting beam and restrain its energy. Deformable mirror(DM) is designed to adjust these wavefront aberrations. Bimorph DM becomes more popular and more applicable among adaptive optical(AO) systems with advantages in simple structure, low cost and flexible design compared to traditional discrete driving DM. The defocus aberration accounted for a large proportion of all wavefront aberrations, with a simpler surface and larger amplitude than others, so it is very useful to correct the defocus aberration effectively for beam controlling and aberration adjusting of AO system. In this study, we desired on correcting the 3rd and 10th Zernike modes, analyze the characteristic of the 3rd and 10th defocus aberration surface distribution, design 3-element actuators unimorph DM model，study on its structure and deformation principle theoretically, design finite element models of different electrode configuration with different ring diameters, analyze and compare effects of different electrode configuration and different fixing mode to DM deformation capacity through COMSOL finite element software, compare fitting efficiency of DM models to the 3rd and 10th Zernike modes. We choose the inhomogeneous electrode distribution model with better result, get the influence function of every electrode and the voltage-PV relationship of the model. This unimorph DM is suitable for the AO system with a mainly defocus aberration.