Vortex beam based more stable annular laser guide star

摘要

We present an annular laser guide star (LGS) concept for large ground-based telescopes in this paper. The more stable annular LGS is generated by turbulence-resisted vortex beam. In the uplink, a vortex beam tends to wander more slightly than a Gaussian beam does in atmospheric turbulence. This may enable an annular LGS to wander more slightly than a traditional Gaussian beam generated LGS does, which would ease the burden of uplink tip-tilt mirror and benefit a dynamical closed-loop adaptive optics system. We conducted numerical simulation to validate the feasibility of this concept. And we have gotten 31% reduced variance of spot wandering of annular LGS. Besides, we set up a spatial light modulator based laser guide star simulator for beam propagation in turbulent atmosphere to experimentally test the annular LGS concept. Preliminary experimental results are given. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time this concept is formulated.