Scintillation compensation for laser beam projection using segmented deformable mirrors

摘要

A two deformable mirror concept for correcting scintillation effects in laser beam projection through the turbulence atmosphere has been previously studied. This system uses a deformable mirror and a Fourier transforming mirror to adjust the amplitude of the wave front in the telescope pupil. A second deformable mirror is used to correct the phase of the wave front before it leaves the aperture. The phase applied to the deformable mirror used for controlling the beam amplitude is obtained using a technique based on the Fienup phase retrieval algorithm. In the earlier work pointwise control of the wave front phase was assumed. In this paper we explore the consequences of using realistic finite degree of freedom segmented deformable mirrors to implement the two deformable mirror-based scintillation compensation technique. Our results show that under nearly all conditions of interest single deformable mirror branch point-based phase reconstruction provides equal or superior performance in this laser beam projection paradigm.