Metasurface-based Toroidal Lenslet Array Design for Addressing Laser Guide Star Elongation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel metasurface-based lenslet array designed to compress the elongated laser guide star images in adaptive optics systems, enhancing wavefront sensing accuracy for large telescopes.

Contribution

The paper presents a new nano-engineered meta-optics design that achieves significant anamorphic image compression, improving wavefront sensor performance in laser guide star applications.

Findings

Meta-lenslet arrays can reduce image size by over 100% at 8mm focal length.

Designs enable more effective sampling of elongated laser guide star images.

Fabrication feasibility within current nano-fabrication limits is demonstrated.

Abstract

The Giant Magellan Telescope will use laser tomography adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric turbulence using artificial guide stars created in the sodium layer of the atmosphere (altitude ~95km). The sodium layer has appreciable thickness (~11km) and this results in the laser guide star being an elongated cylinder shape. Wavefront sensing with a Shack-Hartmann is challenging, as subapertures located further away from the laser launch position image an increasingly elongated perspective of the laser guide star. Large detectors can be used to adequately pack and sample the images on the detector, however, this increases readout noise and limits the design space available for the wavefront sensor. To tackle this challenge, we propose an original solution based on nano-engineered meta-optics tailored to produce a spatially varying anamorphic image scale compression. We present meta-lenslet array designs that can deliver ~100% of the full anamorphic image size reduction required for focal lengths down to 8mm, and greater than 50% image size reduction for focal lengths down to 2mm. This will allow greatly improved sampling of the available information across the whole wavefront sensor, while still being a viable design within the limits of current-generation fabrication facilities.