Off-axis point spread function characterisation in laser-guide star adaptive optics systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, accurate, and computationally efficient model for characterizing the off-axis PSF in laser-guide star adaptive optics systems, crucial for improving astronomical measurements.

Contribution

It presents a generalized phase decomposition model that better captures PSF anisoplanatism effects and demonstrates its accuracy and efficiency through simulations and testbed data.

Findings

Model agrees with physical-optics simulations within 0.1%

PSF morphology can be estimated at 1% accuracy with 7-layer atmospheric modeling

Off-axis PSF characteristics can be retrieved within 10% of variance unexplained

Abstract

Adaptive optics (AO) restore the angular resolution of ground-based telescopes, but at the cost of delivering a time- and space-varying point spread function (PSF) with a complex shape. PSF knowledge is crucial for breaking existing limits on the measured accuracy of photometry and astrometry in science observations. In this paper, we concentrate our analyses on anisoplanatism signature only onto PSF: for large-field observations (20") with single- conjugated AO, PSFs are strongly elongated due to anisoplanatism that manifests itself as three different terms for Laser-guide star (LGS) systems: angular, focal and tilt. We propose a generalized model that relies on a point-wise decomposition of the phase and encompasses the non-stationarity of LGS systems. We demonstrate it is more accurate and less computationally demanding than existing models: it agrees with end-to-end physical-optics simulations to within 0.1% of PSF measurables, such as Strehl-ratio, FWHM and fraction of variance unexplained.Secondly, we study off-axis PSF modelling is with respect to $C_n^2(h)$ profile (heights and fractional weights). For 10m class telescope, PSF morphology is estimated at 1% level as long as we model the atmosphere with at least 7 layers whose heights and weights are known respectively with 200m and 10% precision. As a verification test we used the Canada's NRC-Herzberg HeNOS testbed data, featuring four lasers. We highlight capability of retrieving off-axis PSF characteristics within 10% of fraction of variance unexplained, which complies with the expected range from the sensitivity analysis. Our new off-axis PSF modelling method lays the ground-work for testing on-sky in the near future.