Laser guide star spot shrinkage for affordable wavefront sensors

摘要

Innovative optical designs allow tackling the spot elongation issues in Shack-Hartman based laser guide star wavefront sensors. We propose two solutions using either a combination of two arrays of freeform microlenses, or a combination of freeform optics, to perform a shrinkage of the laser spots as well as a magnification of the SH focal plane. These approaches will drastically reduce the number of needed pixels, thus making possible the use of existing detectors. We present the recent advances on this activity as well as the estimation of performance, linearity and sensitivity of the compressed system in presence of aberrations.