Effect of an adaptive optical system's temporal response on imaging performance

摘要

Abstract: With the advent of adaptive optical imaging systems it has become possible to compensate for the deleterious effects of the atmosphere. Many researchers have quantified the performance of adaptive optical systems with respect to wave front sensor noise, finite wave front sampling, finite degrees of freedom in the wave front reconstruction device, and anisoplanatism. Here we study the performance degradation due to the finite time response of the adaptive optical system. As expected, the degradation is a strong function of the time delay between wave front sensing and wave front correction. In addition we find that the degradation is a strong function of the aperture size as well as whether overall wave front tilt is removed. Many of the prior studies of the effect of time delay are restricted to cases in which neither overall piston or tilt are removed. These prior results are pessimistic in terms of quantifying the degradation experienced for a given time delay. !23