Optical design of the laser launch telescope via physical optics theorem for Laser Guide Star Facility

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physical optics-based method for designing laser launch telescopes in Laser Guide Star Facilities, improving accuracy over traditional geometrical optics approaches for long-distance laser propagation.

Contribution

It presents a novel optical design approach using physical optics theorem and a tolerance analysis method for laser launch telescopes in LGSF systems.

Findings

Design based on physical optics improves laser spot accuracy.

Physical optics propagation is essential for long-distance laser systems.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

The Laser Guide Star Facility (LGSF), as the most important part of the adaptive optics system of the large ground-based telescope, is aimed to generate multiple laser guide stars at the sodium layer. Laser Launch Telescope is employed to implement this requirement by projecting the Gauss beam to the sodium layer with a small beam size in LGSF system. As the diffraction and interference effects of laser's long-distance transmission, the conventional optical design based on the geometrical optics mechanism cannot achieve the expected laser propagation. In this paper, we propose a method to design optical system for laser launch telescope based on the physical optics theorem to generate an acceptable light spot at the sodium layer in the atmosphere. Besides, a tolerance analysis method based on physical optics propagation is also demonstrated to be necessitated to optimize the system's instrumentation performance. The numerical results show that the optical design considering physical optics propagation is highly rewarding and even necessitated in many occasions, especially for laser beam propagation systems.