The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) will see first light with a single primary mirror in January 2003. It will be equipped with fully adaptive secondary mirrors from the beginning as well as a complete on-axis wavefront sensing and tip-tilt guiding system. Here we present the preliminary design of the Acquisition, Guiding, and Wavefront sensing system for the LBT. The system is divided in an of...

Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensors (SH-WFS) have little sensitivity in depth and hence are unsuitable for microscopy and are limited for retinal imaging. We demonstrate the first direct Shack–Hartmann measurement of wavefront originating from a multiple-layer target, in the presence of significant stray reflections that render a standard SH-WFS inoperable. A coherence-gate SH-WFS is implemented b...

We demonstrate a fast, direct wavefront-sensing method for dynamic in vivo adaptive optical two-photon microscopy. By using a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor and open-loop control, the system provides high-speed wavefront measurement and correction. To measure the wavefront in the middle of a Drosophila embryo at early stages, autofluorescence from endogenous fluorophores in the yolk were used ...

The wavefront of an injection-seeded soft x-ray laser beam generated by amplification of high-harmonic pulses in a λ=18.9 nm molybdenum plasma amplifier was measured by a Hartmann wavefront sensor with an accuracy of λ/32 root mean square (rms). A significant improvement in wavefront aberrations of 0.51±0.03λ rms to 0.23±0.01λ rms was observed as a function of plasma column length. The variatio...

Wavefronts can be accurately estimated directly from either focal plane images or defocused pupil plane images, in schemes similar to phase diversity. These wavefront sensing techniques offers fundamental advantages over more traditional techniques for high contrast Adaptive Optics. When combined with a high performance coronagraph, these techniques enable efficient detection of exoplanets. 1. ...

A new wavefront sensing and reconstruction technique is presented. It is possible to measure Laplacian and gradient information of a wavefront with a Hartmann-Shack setup. By simultaneously using the Laplacian and gradient data we reconstruct the wavefront by sequentially solving two partial differential equations.

Consider a perfect AO system with a very fine wavefront sampling interval and a very small actuator interval. If this AO system senses wavefront at a wavelength, λWFS, and does science imaging at another wavelength, λSCI , the light paths through the turbulent atmosphere at these two wavelengths are slightly different for a finite zenith distance, z. The error in wavefront reconstruction of the...

A novel wavefront sensor based on a microstructural array of waveguides is proposed. The method is based on the sensitivity in light-coupling efficiency to the wavefront gradient present at the entrance aperture of each waveguide in an array, and hence the amount of incident light that couples is influenced by wavefront aberrations. The concept is illustrated with wavefront measurements that ha...