Leonid Beresnev (U.S. Army Research Laboratory), Mikhail Vorontsov (U.S. Army Research Laboratory), Peter Wangsness (Wangsness Optics)
Keywords: Adaptive Optics
Abstract:
Existing HEL beam control architectures are extremely complicated because they require installation and alignment of a large number of optical elements, resulting in substantial increase of the entire HEL system size, weight and cost. There is a strong interest in designing new robust beam control capabilities integrated directly to a beam director system.
The discussed technical effort is focused on development and demonstration of a new adaptive beam director (ABD) consisting of a beam forming telescope with wavefront compensation integrated solely on its ultra-lightweight primary mirror. This on-mirror AO system will be controlled using a stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) controller specifically designed for target-in-the-loop (TIL) operation.
The key component of the on-mirror AO system is its primary mirror. This mirror contains an array of pockets machined on its backside, called a pocket-mirror. A special dielectric layer deposited on the front surface of the pocket-mirror is highly reflective for the HEL wavelength ???HEL, and semi-transparent for the laser illuminator wavelength ?ILL. Thus the wave ?ILL scattered by the target surface enters inside the mirror pockets, while the outgoing HEL beam with wavelength ?HEL is totally reflected. The pockets of the ABD pocket-mirror include opto-electronic components that can provide local (inside pocket-window) wavefront correction and sensing.
Wavefront correction at each pocket aperture is performed using electrically sectioned piezo-ceramic annular rings made from thin (~0.3 mm) bimorph discs glued to the pocket bottoms. Control voltages applied to these electrodes result in mechanical deformation of the pocket-window front surface thus providing compensation of low-order aberrations at each pocket-window. Packaging the pockets with a high fill factor allows high resolution control of the beam director primary mirror shape. Preliminary analysis has shown that surface stroke near 3 microns with bandwidth near 10 kHz can be achieved.
Date of Conference: September 10-14, 2006
Track: Adaptive Optics