Speckle Mitigation for Wavefront Sensing in the Presence of Weak Turbulence
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-15-2019
Abstract
When measuring atmospheric turbulence along the propagation path to an extended non-cooperative target, a wavefront sensor normally suffers from severe noise due to speckle. In this work, we quantify the benefits of speckle mitigation via polychromatic illumination for a Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor. We obtain results over a wide range of conditions by using the spectral-slicing approach to polychromatic wave-optics simulations. To quantify speckle noise, even when turbulence is present, we introduce a metric involving racetrack-mode strength in slope-discrepancy space. The results show that polychromatic illumination greatly reduces speckle noise under realistic conditions. Even with near worst-case conditions, 15 coherence lengths per resolution cell reduce the wavefront-measurement error by 56%.
Source Publication
Applied Optics
Recommended Citation
Noah R. Van Zandt, Mark F. Spencer, and Steven T. Fiorino, "Speckle mitigation for wavefront sensing in the presence of weak turbulence," Appl. Opt. 58, 2300-2310 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1364/AO.58.002300
Comments
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