Adaptive optics system for fast automatic control of laser beam jitters in air

Abstract

Adaptive Optics (AO) Systems can operate fast automatic control of laser beam jitters for several applications of basic research as well as for the improvement of industrial and medical devices. We here present our theoretical and experimental research showing the opportunity of suppressing laser beam geometrical fluctuations of higher order Hermite Gauss modes in interferometric Gravitational Waves (GW) antennas. This in turn allows to significantly reduce the noise that originates from the coupling of the laser source oscillations with the interferometer asymmetries and introduces the concrete possibility of overcoming the sensitivity limit of the GW antennas actually set at 10^-23 1 Hz value. We have carried out the feasibility study of a novel AO System which performs effective laser jitters suppression in the 200 Hz bandwidth. It extracts the wavefront error signals in terms of Hermite Gauss (HG) coefficients and performs the wavefront correction using the Zernike polynomials. An experimental Prototype of the AO System has been implemented and tested in our laboratory at the University of Salerno and the results we have achieved fully confirm effectiveness and robustness of the control upon first and second order laser beam geometrical fluctuations, in good accordance with GW antennas requirements. Above all, we have measured 60 dB reduction of astigmatism and defocus modes at low frequency below 1 Hz and 20 dB reduction in the 200 Hz bandwidth.