Modeling of pulsed laser guide stars for the Thirty Meter Telescope project

摘要

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) has been designed to include an adaptiveoptics system and associated laser guide star (LGS) facility to correct for theimage distortion due to Earth's atmospheric turbulence and achievediffraction-limited imaging. We have calculated the response of mesosphericsodium atoms to a pulsed laser that has been proposed for use in the LGSfacility, including modeling of the atomic physics, the light-atominteractions, and the effect of the geomagnetic field and atomic collisions.This particular pulsed laser format is shown to provide comparable photonreturn to a continuous-wave (cw) laser of the same average power; both the cwand pulsed lasers have the potential to satisfy the TMT design requirements forphoton return flux.