Pupil calibration for pyramid wavefront sensors based on a wavefront corrector.

Abstract

The pyramid wavefront sensor (PWS) presents numerous advantages, such as high energy utilization, exceptional spatial resolution, and adjustability. Precise calibration of the pupil's position and size in advance is essential for accurately extracting wavefront slope information from the captured pupil image by the PWS. What we believe to be a novel calibration method is proposed using a wavefront corrector to enhance the sharpness of the pupil images in the PWS. An experimental setup using a crystal spatial light modulator (SLM) is established to validate this method. Both physical experiments and simulated results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve accurate calibration of the pupil image with an error within 4 pixels for pupil size and not exceeding 3 pixels for position, meeting practical application requirements. The proposed PWS calibration method exhibits excellent repeatability and robustness, making it directly applicable in astronomical adaptive optics systems.