We explore adaptive optics (AO) pre-compensation for optical communication between Earth and geostationary (GEO) satellites in a laboratory experiment. Thus, we built a rapid control prototyping breadboard with an adjustable point-ahead angle where downlink and uplink can operate both at 1064 nm and 1550 nm wavelength. With our real-time system, beam wander resulting from artificial turbulence was reduced such that the beam hits the satellite at least 66% of the time as compared to merely 3% without correction. A seven-fold increase of the average Strehl ratio to (28 ± 15)% at 18 μrad point-ahead angle leads to a considerable reduction of the calculated fading probability. These results make AO pre-compensation a viable technique to enhance Earth-to-GEO optical communication.

The thermal-piezoelectric deformable mirror (TPDM) is a device employed to compensate for laser-induced mirror deformation and thermal lensing in high-power optical systems. The TPDM setup is a unimorph deformable mirror with thermal and piezoelectric actuation properties. Laser-induced thermal lensing is compensated for by heating of the TPDM. We show that this mirror can be applied to high-power laser systems of up to 6.2 kW laser power and high power densities of up to 2  kW/cm2. The piezoelectric stroke of the single actuators is between 1.5 and 4 μm and is not reduced by either the absorbed laser power or mirror heating.

We present progressive work that is based on our recently developed rapid control prototyping system (RCP), designed for the implementation of high-performance adaptive optical control algorithms using a continuous deformable mirror (DM). The RCP system, presented in 2014, is resorting to a Xilinx Kintex-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), placed on a self-developed PCIe card, and installed on a high-performance computer that runs a hard real-time Linux operating system. For this purpose, algorithms for the efficient evaluation of data from a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) on an FPGA have been developed. The corresponding analog input and output cards are designed for exploiting the maximum possible performance while not being constrained to a specific DM and control algorithm due to the RCP approach. In this second part of our contribution, we focus on recent results that we achieved with this novel experimental setup. By presenting results which are far superior to the former ones, we further justify the deployment of the RCP system and its required time and resources. We conducted various experiments for revealing the effective performance, i.e. the maximum manageable complexity in the controller design that may be achieved in realtime without performance losses. A detailed analysis of the hidden latencies is carried out, showing that these latencies have been drastically reduced. In addition, a series of concepts relating the evaluation of the wavefront as well as designing and synthesizing a wavefront are thoroughly investigated with the goal to overcome some of the prevalent limitations. Furthermore, principal results regarding the closed-loop performance of the low-speed dynamics of the integrated heater in a DM concept are illustrated in detail; to be combined with the piezo-electric high-speed actuators in the next step

The period of fiber Bragg gratings is adapted by shaping the wavefronts of ultrashort laser pulses applied in a phase mask inscription technique. A specially designed deformable mirror, based on a dielectric substrate to withstand high peak powers, is utilized to deform the wavefront. A shift of about 11 nm is demonstrated for a Bragg wavelength around 1550 nm.

Abstract. This paper reports on the thermomechanical modeling and characterization of a micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems deformable mirror (DM). This unimorph DM offers a low-temperature cofired ceramic substrate with screen-printed piezoceramic actuators on its rear surface and a machined copper layer on its front surface. We present the DM setup, thermomechanical modeling, and hybrid fabrication. The setup of the DM is transferred into a thermomechanical model in ANSYS Multiphysics. The thermomechanical modeling of the DM evaluates and optimizes the mount material and the copper-layer thickness for the loading cases: homogeneous thermal loading and laser-loading of the mirror. Subsequently, the developed and theoretically optimized DM setup is experimentally validated. The homogeneous loading of the optimized design results in a membrane deformation with a rate of −0.2 μm K −1 , whereas the laser loading causes an opposed change with a rate of −0.2 μm W −1 . Therefore, the proposed mirror design is suitable to precompensate laser-generated mirror deformations by homogeneous thermal loading (heating). We experimentally show that a 35-K preheating of the mirror assembly compensates for an absorbed laser power of 1.25 W. Therefore, the novel compensation regime "compound loading" for the suppression of laser-induced deformations is developed and proven.