Phase-diverse adaptive optics for future telescopes

Abstract

Phase Diversity (PD) is a wavefront-sensing technology that offers certain advantages in an Adaptive-Optics (AO) system. Historically, PD has not been considered for use in AO applications because computations have been prohibitive. However, algorithmic and computational-hardware advances have recently allowed use of PD in AO applications. PD is an attractive candidate for AO applications for a variety of reasons. The optical hardware required is simple to implement and eliminates non-common path errors. In addition, PD has also been shown to work well with extended scenes that are encountered, for example, when imaging low-contrast solar granulation. PD can estimate high-order continuous aberrations as well as wavefront discontinuities characteristic of segmented-aperture or sparse-aperture telescope designs. Furthermore, the fundamental information content in a PD data set is shown to be greater than that of the correlation Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor for the limiting case of unresolved objects. These advantages coupled with recent laboratory results (extended-scene closed-loop AO with PD sampling at 100 Hz) highlight the maturation of not only the PD concept and algorithm but the technology as an emerging and viable wavefront sensor for use in AO applications.