Development of an ELT XAO testbed using a Mach-Zehnder wavefront sensor: calibration of the deformable mirror

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and calibration of a high-order adaptive optics testbed using a Mach-Zehnder wavefront sensor, aimed at enabling high contrast imaging for 30m-class telescopes like the E-ELT.

Contribution

It introduces a novel calibration method for a deformable mirror within an XAO testbed utilizing a Mach-Zehnder wavefront sensor, tailored for extremely large telescopes.

Findings

Successful calibration of the deformable mirror using Zygo interferometer metrology.

Effective flattening of the DM to compensate for low order aberrations.

Validation of the Gaussian influence function model for the DM.

Abstract

(abridged) Extreme adaptive optics (XAO) encounters severe difficulties to cope with the high speed (>1kHz), high accuracy and high order requirements for future extremely large telescopes. An innovative high order adaptive optics system using a self-referenced Mach-Zehnder wavefront sensor (MZWFS) allows counteracting these limitations. This sensor estimates very accurately the wavefront phase at small spatial scale by measuring intensity differences between two outputs, with a $\lambda /4$ path length difference between its two legs, but is limited in dynamic range due to phase ambiguity. During the past few years, such an XAO system has been studied by our team in the framework of 8-meter class telescopes. In this work, we report on our latest results with the XAO testbed recently installed in our lab, and dedicated to high contrast imaging with 30m-class telescopes (such as the E-ELT or the TMT). After reminding the principle of a MZWFS and describing the optical layout of our experiment, we will show the results of the assessment of the woofer-tweeter phase correctors, i.e., a Boston Micromachine continuous membrane deformable mirror (DM) and a Boulder Nonlinear Systems liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM). In particular, we will detail the calibration of the DM using Zygo interferometer metrology. Our method consists in the precise measurement of the membrane deformation while applying a constant deformation to 9 out of 140 actuators at the same time. By varying the poke voltage across the DM operating range, we propose a simple but efficient way of modeling the DM influence function using a Gaussian model. Finally, we show the DM flattening on the MZWFS allowing to compensate for low order aberrations.