Structural approach to the Adaptive Optics tomography problem: Multi-Conjugate turbulence correction

Abstract

The necessity of correcting the perturbations related to light propagation in the turbulent atmosphere and obtaining the diffraction-limited images requires computer processing of a large information flow in real time. Here the straightforward approaches, which ignore the structural properties of the atmospheric turbulence and the active optical system itself, lead to algorithms with complexity proportional to the fourth power of the aperture diameter. In the paper it is shown that taking into account the structural properties of atmospheric turbulence as well as the active optical system itself allows to significantly reduce the complexity coming close to the second power of the diameter. The approach is proposed, which is based on the efficient construction of deformable mirror commands in a multi-conjugate adaptive system in the case of already known turbulence volume distribution taking into account structural properties of the active optical system itself. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated by the example of the system of adaptive optics of a 30-meter telescope pupil with a 6-layer atmospheric turbulence model.