Innovative Membrane Deformable Mirrors

Nowadays adaptive optics (AO) is a very powerful technique for several scientific and technological applications, and with important economical perspectives. In the last decade, AO technology has fostered new solutions to improve adaptive components performance. While the scientific line has grown up quickly, AO has not experienced yet a wide spread commercial diffusion because a reasonable trade-off between performance and costs of adaptive components has not been found yet. This aspect makes AO a technology very attractive but still under development. In fact, many different AO technologies have been studied in the last years, as for example electrostatic membranes, electromagnetic fields, piezoelectricity, electro-striction, liquid crystals, MEMS etc. All these new technologies have peculiar properties which make them very useful and interesting for specific applications; however, the “universal” component, the one which could simultaneously satisfy all the requirements, has not been found yet.