End-to-end simulations of a near-infrared pyramid sensor on Keck II

TL;DR

This paper presents end-to-end simulations of a near-infrared pyramid wavefront sensor for Keck II, evaluating its performance in adaptive optics modes and comparing it with a focal-plane sensor to inform future upgrades.

Contribution

It provides detailed simulation results of the pyramid sensor's performance in Keck II's adaptive optics system, including Strehl ratios and residuals, and compares it with LIFT for low-order sensing.

Findings

Optimized configurations yield high Strehl ratios in NGS mode.

LIFT sensor can improve low-order sensing by about 2 magnitudes.

Simulations inform future adaptive optics upgrades for Keck II.

Abstract

The future upgrade of Keck II telescope's adaptive optics system will include a pyramid wavefront sensor working in the near-infrared (J and H band). It will benefit from the recently developed avalanche photodiode arrays, specifically the SAPHIRA (Selex) array, which provides a low noise ($<$ 1 e- at high frame rates). The system will either work with a natural guide star (NGS) in a single conjugated adaptive optics system, or in a laser guide star (LGS) mode. In this case, the pyramid would be used as a low-order sensor only. We report on a study of the pyramid sensor's performance via end-to-end simulations, applied to Keck's specific case. We present the expected Strehl ratio with optimized configurations in NGS mode, and the expected residual on low orders in LGS mode. In the latter case, we also compare the pyramid to LIFT, a focal-plane sensor, demonstrating the ability of LIFT to provide a gain of about 2 magnitudes for low-order sensing.