Beam stabilization is critical in an adaptive optics beam clean-up system to improve the power concentration in the desired area during a period of time. In these systems, the average wavefront slope from a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor is widely employed as the feedback of beam stabilization. However, when the adaptive optics system is applied to improve the beam quality of a high-power solid-state slab laser, the “M” shaped aberration at the edge of the slab and the fluctuating intensity distribution of the beam would induce some errors when using the average slope to measure the direction of the beam. In this paper, we present the numerical analysis of beam direction detection errors in solid-state slab laser beam clean-up systems using the average slop. At first, we calculated the direction detection errors with the aberations composed of the first 64 Legendre polynomials using the average slope. Then we measured the wavefront of a solid-state slab laser with a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, and evaluated the influence of the “M” shaped aberration and fluctuating intensity distributions both in the time and frequency domains. It is clear that these factors bring in significant detection errors. Finally, we proposed a method by removing some edge sub-apertures when calculating the average slope.
Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors calculate the position of focal spot in each sub-aperture from intensity distributions, the noises of the detector itself would have a certain impact on the detecting accuracy and would lead to inaccurate wavefront detections using conventional centroiding method. It has been demonstrated that the correlation algorithms with template matching is able to improve the accuracy. In this paper, several correlation algorithms such as absolute difference function, absolute difference function-squared, square difference function, cross-correlation function and normalized cross-correlation are compared at different signal-to-noise ratios. To further improve the accuracy, interpolation algorithms including equiangular line fitting, parabola interpolation, gauss interpolation and least square method are brought in, which turns out that least square method could minimize the detecting error. Besides, simulations within single aperture and full aperture both illustrate that cross-correlation function is most robust but needs more calculations, so is least square method. Moreover, although absolute difference function would be inaccurate at low signal-to-noise ratios, it still can obtain high detecting accuracy at high signal-to-noise ratios and it minimizes the calculations.
Direct liquid-cooling is a promising way of power scaling and heat management for solid-state lasers. A side-pumped direct liquid-cooled solid-state pulsed zigzag MOPA system is established based on this advanced concept. However, its beam quality is degraded by the thermal distortions in the non-zigzag direction and the flowing coolant. We develop an adaptive optics system to improve its beam quality, which primarily includes a low-order aberration compensator and a 59-actuator deformable mirror. The beam is first corrected by the low-order aberration compensator to remove large defocus and astigmatism, and its size is reshaped simultaneously to fulfill the demands of applications. Then the beam is further corrected by the deformable mirror. With collaborative operation of the low-order aberration compensator and the deformable mirror, we have achieved average beam quality of β=2.8.
In adaptive optics,Hartmann-shack wavefront sensor and image acquired from camera has been widely used to detect incident wavefront and the application of laser wavefront correction. A numerical simulation method of generating high resolution virtual camera image, which is based on Fourier optics and realized by FFT algorithm, is mentioned in this paper. In the condition of incident laser beam wavefront with only tilt phase aberration, calculating deviation of centroid offset between the result from virtual camera image and theoretical value, is compared to verify the accuracy of this numerical simulation method and virtual Hartmann-shack image generation model.
The search-based intra-cavity beam cleanup systems are typical feedback loop systems which have been used in both gas
and solid-state laser cavity to enhance laser performance. The studies on search-based intra-cavity beam cleanup systems
mostly rely on experiments. However there are few reports about numerical simulation. In this paper, we attempt to use
numerical method to analysis the search-based intra-cavity beam cleanup system. These systems contain three main
elements: an adaptive laser cavity, a fitness sensor of laser performance and a computer-based search algorithm.
According to the compositions of beam cleanup systems, three modules have been set up in our numerical simulation
framework. We detail the theory, structure and numerical method of these modules in this paper. To demonstrate the
feasibility of the numerical method, we calculated the results based on stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm.
This paper proposed a low-cost and high performance adaptive optics real-time controller in free space optical communication system. Real-time controller is constructed with a 4-core CPU with Linux operation system patched with Real-Time Application Interface (RTAI) and a frame-grabber, and the whole cost is below $6000. Multi-core parallel processing scheme and SSE instruction optimization for reconstruction process result in about 5 speedup, and overall processing time for this 137-element adaptive optic system can reach below 100 us and with latency about 50 us by utilizing streamlined processing scheme, which meet the requirement of processing at frequency over 1709 Hz. Real-time data storage system designed by circle buffer make this system to store consecutive image frames and provide an approach to analysis the image data and intermediate data such as slope information.
Based on a 979-actuator adaptive optics system, this paper analyzes the different performance of iterative wavefront
reconstruction algorithms. Under the condition of dynamic wavefront errors, the iteration number, storage space and the
number of multiplication of steepest descent method, conjugate gradient method and G-S iterative method are studied.
The steepest descent method and conjugate gradient method need smaller storage space. Both the G-S iterative method
and the conjugate gradient method converge faster than steepest descent method, while the latter takes the least number
of multiplication. Finally, the optimal iterative algorithm is selected considering storage space, iteration numbers and the
number of multiplication.
The performance of Adaptive Optics (AO) real-time controller based on Central Processing Unit (CPU) has significantly progressed due to the introduction of the high speed frame-grabber and a 4-cores CPU, which make it possible to process at frequency over 2000 Hz for 4-meter-class telescope and to integrate the real-time task and the user interface program in this compact device. The detailed architecture of this computation system is demonstrated in this paper, and the performance and suitability of this architecture is also discussed by measuring the latency of the controller processing via an adaptive optics emulator system with 16 times 16 and 32 times 32 sub-aperture, and the overall typical processing time is 61 us and 322 us respectively. Test result turns out that it is well suited for the next generation 4-meter-class adaptive optics system and it is possible to process at frequency over 2000 Hz for a 3000-element AO system in 10- meter-class telescope with one board of art-of-the-state computer and a frame-grabber. Comparison with GPU and FPGA based architecture is also discussed in this paper.
A 3mm narrow interval deformable mirror (DM) with tip-tilt stage has been developed for astronomical instruments.
Benefiting from its compact design, the adaptive optics system can be built with simple structure and smaller optical
elements. First, a 37-elements prototype mirror has been developed for our 1.8-meter telescope, which interval space is
3mm, maximum tilt is ±10’, and maximum deformation is ±2μm. Based on this mirror, a simple adaptive optics system has been set up and its performance was tested in the laboratory especially the closed-loop correction ability. This
adaptive optics subsystem is scheduled to be mounted at one folded Cassegrain focus of the 1.8-meter telescope this
year, and comparison test for star compensation observation using this compact system and conventional adaptive optics
system will also be carried out at the same time.
KEYWORDS: Adaptive optics, Digital signal processing, Real-time computing, Wavefronts, Field programmable gate arrays, Lawrencium, Wavefront sensors, Signal processing, Solar telescopes, Detection and tracking algorithms
A low-order solar adaptive optics (AO) system had been successfully built and installed at 1m New Vacuum Solar
Telescope (NVST) of Full-shine Lake Solar Observatory. The real time controller (RTC) of the AO system, which
consists of a correlation tracker and a high-order wavefront correction controller, was developed. In this system, the
absolute difference algorithm is used to detect wavefront gradients. A new architecture with field-programmable gate
array (FPGA) and digital signal processor (DSP) for the real-time controller based on systolic array and pipeline was
designed. The controller was integrated into the AO system and saw the first light on February 24th, 2011, using solar
granulation as the beacon. Later, the AO-corrected high resolution sunspots images were obtained using sunspots as the
beacon. The observational results show that the contrast and resolution of the solar images are improved evidently after
the correction by the AO system. The design of the RTC and the observational results will be presented.
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