Real time simulation of atmospheric turbulence based on GPU

Abstract

Simulated turbulence phase screens have been widely used in a series of optical experiments, but their speed and accuracy still need to be improved. Because of that, We use sparse spectral models for atmospheric turbulence simulation, and we use the Computational Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to accelerate the calculation process. Finally, we load the calculated turbulence model onto the Liquid Crystal Atmospheric Turbulence Simulator (LC-ATS). The atmospheric turbulence model was used as a wavefront phase screen, and that model was deployed to the Liquid Crystal Spatial Light Modulator (LC-SLM). In 512 × 512 resolution, it takes 1.36 ms per frame, and it reaches 423 Hz on the liquid crystal on silicon (LC-OS).