Improvement of Shack–Hartmann wave-front sensor measurement for extreme adaptive optics

The development of high-performance adaptive optics systems requires the optimization of wave-front sensors (WFSs) working in the high-order correction regime. We propose a new method to improve the wave-front slope estimation of a Shack-Hartmann WFS in such a regime. Based on a detailed analysis of the different errors in the slope estimation with a classical centroid and with the new method, the gain in terms of wave-front-sensing accuracy in both the detector and the photon noise regimes is stressed. This improvement is proposed without major system disruption.