Design of the wavefront sensor unit of ARGOS, the LBT laser guide star system

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, simulation, and optimization of the wavefront sensor unit for ARGOS, the LBT laser guide star system, demonstrating its capability to significantly improve adaptive optics performance.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive optical and mechanical design process for ARGOS's wavefront sensor, validated through numerical simulations and optimization.

Findings

ARGOS can reduce seeing by a factor of 2.

The system achieves a fourfold increase in LUCI's integration time.

Design tolerances and stability requirements are established for system components.

Abstract

ARGOS is the laser guide star ground layer adaptive optics system of the LBT. ARGOS is designed to bring a moderate but uniform reduction of the PSF size over a FoV as large as 4x4arcmin, allowing a significative increase of the science throughput of LUCI, the LBT NIR imager and MOS. ARGOS relays on 3 Rayleigh beacons to sense the lower layers of the atmosphere achieving almost 100% sky coverage. The ground layer AO correction is allowed by the 2 adaptive secondaries of the LBT. This PhD thesis first discusses a study based on numerical simulations and aimed to evaluate the performance of ARGOS. This work has been carried out using CAOS and representing in the code most of the features that characterize the system itself: as the laser beacon propagation in the atmosphere, the SH type wavefront sensing, the AO reconstruction and closed loop delays and the atmosphere tip-tilt sensing done using a NGS and a quad-cell type sensor. The results obtained in this study are in agreement and definitively confirm the performance evaluated in the phase studies of the project. This study shows that ARGOS is able to produce a reduction of a factor 2 of the seeing bringing to a gain of a factor 4 in the integration time required by LUCI. This PhD thesis reports also the optical design and optimization of both the ARGOS dichroic window, used to separate the laser light from the science light, and the LGS WFS, that evaluates the ground layer aberrations averaging the SH measurements in the direction of the 3 LGS. For both of the subsystems the optimization process is analyzed. Then are evaluated the tolerances and specifications for the production and coating of the optics. Finally are evaluated the stability requirement for the mechanical design and the degrees of freedom needed for the alignment purposes.