Advanced control of ALPAO DMs leads to significant AO performance improvements

The rise of exoplanet research and the growing need for high-capacity free-space optical communication links have placed high demands on the performance of adaptive optics (AO) systems. A key challenge lies in mitigating temporal error, this imposes severe time constraints on the response of deformable mirrors (DM). Recent advancements at ALPAO in the realm of input shaping techniques have yielded promising results, effectively eliminating oscillations and reducing overshoot from 60 to less than 5%. Both, rise time and settling time have been diminished to below 50μs, representing an improvement of one order of magnitude compared to the unshaped case. The solution found is compatible with real-time computing constraints and can be integrated in the DM drive electronics or in separate processing unit.