Use and characterization of very large devices for adaptive optics

摘要

The cost of adaptive optics technology is dominated by the cost of current deformable mirror technology which has a range of price going from $2K to $15K per channel. Liquid crystal technology promises to be at least a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper. Liquid crystals offer other advantages such as reliability, low power consumption and with a huge technological momentum based on a wide variety of industrial applications. In this paper we present some preliminary characterizations of a new, large format liquid crystal device. Such devices have the potential for extremely high-resolution wave-front control due to the over 10,000 corrective elements. The results presented here consists of measurements of the phase control relationships, overall optical quality, along with the dynamic response and thermal stability.