Wavefront correction with photo-controlled deformable mirror

Abstract

The Photo-controlled deformable mirror (PCDM) presents an interesting alternative to the conventional deformable mirror technologies as it addresses their two major bottlenecks. It offers enormous spatial resolution while keeping its complexity low due to its elegant control of the deformable surface by light projection. The PCDM prototype was a membrane type deformable mirror driven by a modified commercial mini-projector. Unique properties of PCDM allowed experimental study of actuator array disposition influence on the wavefront shaping performance of the deformable mirror. While keeping all other aspects and parameters of the experiment constant, the four actuator-array configurations were compared and resulting wavefront shaping performance assessed. Moreover, the Photo-controlled deformable mirror was numerically modelled and the experimental results were reproduced with high degree of fidelity. By using the numerical model of PCDM, a novel method to control high spatial resolution wavefront corrector was studied with promising results.