Lukas Weissinger

Lukas Weissinger, Simon Hubmer, Bernadett Stadler et al.

Atmospheric tomography, the problem of reconstructing atmospheric turbulence profiles from wavefront sensor measurements, is an integral part of many adaptive optics systems. It is used to enhance the image quality of ground-based telescopes, such as for the Multiconjugate Adaptive Optics Relay For ELT Observations (MORFEO) instrument on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). To solve this problem, a singular-value decomposition (SVD) based approach has been proposed before. In this paper, we focus on the numerical implementation of the SVD-based Atmospheric Tomography with Fourier Domain Regularization Algorithm (SAFR) and its performance for Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems. The key features of the SAFR algorithm are the utilization of the FFT and the pre-computation of computationally demanding parts. Together, this yields a fast algorithm with less memory requirements than commonly used Matrix Vector Multiplication (MVM) approaches. We evaluate the performance of SAFR regarding reconstruction quality and computational expense in numerical experiments using the simulation environment COMPASS, in which we use an MCAO setup resembling the physical parameters of the MORFEO instrument of the ELT.

Simon Hubmer, Lukas Weissinger, Ronny Ramlau et al.

In this paper, we consider Fourier phase retrieval from differential intensity measurements, i.e., the problem of determining the phase of a complex-valued function from a series of intensity measurements differing only by slight modulations in Fourier domain. These modulations may be induced by optical elements such as prisms or phase plates, or via spatial-light modulators. Generalizing the principles behind the transport of intensity equation, we show that given such differential intensity measurements, the phase can be determined as the solution of certain partial differential or integro-differential equations. This is then used to design efficient reconstruction algorithms for a number of Fourier-type wavefront sensors, such as the pyramid wavefront sensor, commonly used in adaptive optics. Numerical experiments illustrate the usefulness of our proposed approach.