Laboratory testing of the Ingot WFS

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and testing of the Ingot WFS, a novel wavefront sensor designed for elongated LGS sources on ELT telescopes, including a new alignment procedure and response characterization.

Contribution

It introduces the Ingot WFS design, a fully automated Python-based alignment method, and experimental validation of its response to low-order aberrations.

Findings

Successful implementation of the automated alignment procedure.

Characterization of the Ingot WFS sensitivity and linearity.

Validation of ray-tracing simulations against experimental data.

Abstract

The ingot WFS is a new kind of wavefront sensor specifically designed to deal with the elongation of LGS reference sources on ELT-class telescopes. Like the pyramid, it belongs to the family of pupil plane wavefront sensors and can be considered as a generalization of the pyramid WFS for extended, three-dimensional elongated sources. The current design uses a simple, reflective roof-shaped prism to split the light into three pupils that are used to retrieve the wavefront shape. A test-bench has been realized at the INAF-Padova laboratories to test the alignment and functioning of the ingot. The bench is equipped with a deformable lens, conjugated to the pupil plane, able to apply low-order aberrations and with a hexapod for the precise alignment of the ingot prism. In this work we present a robust and fully automated Python-code alignment procedure, which is able, by using the optical feedback from the I-WFS, to adjust its 6-degrees of freedom. Moreover, we report on the tests conducted with the deformable lens to characterize the ingot WFS response to low-order aberrations in terms of sensitivity and linearity. The results are used as a comparison for simulations to validate the ray-tracing modeling approach with the future goal of optimizing the procedure adopted for signal calculation and phase retrieval.