Interferometer-Based Adaptive Optical System

Abstract

Interferometer-based adaptive optics has an advantage of direct mea,surement of the wavefront profile. Nevertheless the majority of adaptiveoptical systems, realized so far, use other types of wavefront sensors,such as Hartmann sensors. Interferometric sensors have two problems:(1) a source of a coherent reference wave should be present and (2)in many cases it is impossible to reconstruct the wavefront unambiguouslyfrom a single interferogram, due to the illposed nature of the phaseunwrapping problem. In the case of an adaptive optical system witha limited number of degrees of freedom, one can expect that the ambiguityof the solution will be partly or even completely eliminated by lookingfor the wavefront reconstruction only in the existing basis. We reporton the expected performance of interferometric adaptive optical systemwith a 37-channel membrane deformable mirror, based on a computermodel of a complete system.