Woofer-tweeter deformable mirror driven by combined actuators with a piezoelectric unimorph and stack for astronomical application.

Abstract

A woofer-tweeter deformable mirror (DM) driven by combined actuators with a piezoelectric unimorph and stack for astronomical applications is proposed. The piezoelectric unimorph "tweeter" part, made of a 200-μm-thick lead zirconate titanate film and 200-μm-thick silicon, has 234 separate elements for high-order correction. It is magnetically jointed with a seven-element "woofer" piezo-stack array, which is for low-order correction. The combined DM was fabricated and experimentally evaluated, showing a high resonant frequency near 1kHz. The piezo-stack array together with the unimorph actuators enable the DM to produce wavefronts with RMS residue errors less than 20nm. Experimental results indicate that the woofer-tweeter DM has the capability to compensate for the first 35 terms of Zernike aberrations with normalized RMS wavefront errors less than 20%. The woofer-tweeter DM has higher bandwidth than a conventional unimorph DM as well as simple structure, low cost, and good scalability, offering a potential alternative for large-aperture astronomical applications.