Spline-based wavefront reconstruction for Shack-Hartmann measurements

In the coming decade, a new generation of extremely large-scale ground-based astronomical telescopes will see first light. It is well known that increasing the size of the telescope aperture is only beneficial if the adaptive optics (AO) system, which compensates for turbulence-induced wavefront aberrations, scales accordingly. For the extreme...

Practical guidelines for implementing adaptive optics in fluorescence microscopy

In life sciences, interest in the microscopic imaging of increasingly complex three dimensional samples, such as cell spheroids, zebrafish embryos, and in vivo applications in small animals, is growing quickly. Due to the increasing complexity of samples, more and more life scientists are considering the implementation of adaptive optics in...

Shack-Hartmann reflective micro profilometer

We present a quantitative phase imaging microscope based on a Shack-Hartmann sensor, that directly reconstructs the optical path difference (OPD) in reflective mode. Comparing with the holographic or interferometric methods, the SH technique needs no reference beam in the setup, which simplifies the system. With a preregistered reference, the...

Optical field reconstruction with digital micromirror interferometry

We investigate the possibility of interferometric optical field sensor with DMD forming a series of sampling interferometers in the pupil of an optical system. Our preliminary experiment validates the feasibility of our approach for the field reconstruction in the case of coherent field. We believe that this approach can be extended to sensing...

Model-based Control in Adaptive Optics Systems

Adaptive optics (AO), also called as Smart Optics, has received increasing attention in the past decades. The main idea behind AO is to actively sense and compensate the optical aberration in the system such that the image resolution is improved or the light beam is well focused. The applications of AO include ground-based telescopes, scanning...

Model-based aberration correction in a closed-loop wavefront-sensor-less adaptive optics system

In many scientific and medical applications, such as laser systems and microscopes, wavefront-sensor-less (WFSless) adaptive optics (AO) systems are used to improve the laser beam quality or the image resolution by correcting the wavefront aberration in the optical path. The lack of direct wavefront measurement in WFSless AO systems imposes a...

Estimation of the total error of modal wavefront reconstruction with Zernike polynomials and Hartmann-Shack test

The paper discusses the influence of the Hartmann-(Shack) wavefront sensor geometry on the total error of modal wavefront reconstruction. A mathematical model is proposed which describes modal wavefront reconstruction based on Hartmann or Hartmann-Shack sensor in terms of linear operators. The modal covers the most general case and is not...

Subjective adaptive correction of the aberrations of the human eye

We designed and built an experimental setup for subjective (manually controlled) correction of up to 12 orthogonal terms (excluding tilts and defocus) of the aberration of the human eye. In our experiments, the subject was looking through an adaptive optical system at the USAF resolution chart. By using the arrow keys of the computer keyboard,...