Experimental assessment of the matched filter for laser guide star wavefront sensing

Abstract

Laser guide star wavefront sensing comes with several limitations. When imaged with a Shack– Hartmann wavefront sensor, the laser guide star is seen as extended sources elongated in the directions given by the lenslet locations and the laser axis. A test bed has been built in the Adaptive Optics Laboratory of the University of Victoria that reproduces this effect as seen on extremely large telescopes. A new wavefront sensing algorithm, the matched filter, has been implemented and its performance assessed with the test bed. Its ability to mitigate laser guide star aberrations by tracking the sodium layer fluctuations in a closed loop adaptive optics system is shown.

© 2009 Optical Society of America

Performance comparison of centroiding algorithms for laser guide star wavefront sensing with extremely large telescopes

Olivier Lardière, Rodolphe Conan, Richard Clare, Colin Bradley, and Norbert Hubin
Appl. Opt. 49(31) G78-G94 (2010)

A laser guide star wavefront sensor bench demonstrator for TMT

Olivier Lardière, Rodolphe Conan, Colin Bradley, Kate Jackson, and Glen Herriot
Opt. Express 16(8) 5527-5543 (2008)

Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing with elongated sodium laser beacons: centroiding versus matched filtering

Luc Gilles and Brent Ellerbroek
Appl. Opt. 45(25) 6568-6576 (2006)

Mitigation of truncation effects in elongated Shack–Hartmann laser guide star wavefront sensor images

Richard M. Clare, Stephen J. Weddell, and Miska Le Louarn
Appl. Opt. 59(22) 6431-6442 (2020)

Laser guide star wavefront sensing for ground-layer adaptive optics on extremely large telescopes

Richard M. Clare, Miska Le Louarn, and Clementine Béchet
Appl. Opt. 50(4) 473-483 (2011)