Performance of a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor sensor for laser guide star wavefront sensing

Abstract

The adaptive optics systems of future Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) will be assisted with laser guide stars (LGS) which will be created in the sodium layer at a height of ≈90 km above the telescopes. In a Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor, the long elongation of LGS spots on the sub-pupils far apart from the laser beam axis constraints the design of the wavefront sensor (WFS) which must be able to fully sample the elongated spots without undersampling the non-elongated spots. To fulfill these requirements, a newly released large complementary metal oxide semiconductor sensor with 1100 × 1600 pixels and 9 μm pixel pitch could be employed. Here, we report on the characterization of such a sensor in terms of noise and linearity, and we evaluate its performance for wavefront sensing based on the spot centroid variations. We then illustrate how this new detector can be integrated into a full LGS WFS for both the European Southern Observatory’s ELT and the Thirty Meter Telescope.