Experimental and theoretical study of deformable mirror actuator arrays

摘要

Deformable mirrors have gained increasing interest in many different fields of application including laser physics, and they are becoming a universal tool for correcting optical aberrations of laser beams especially in large scale laser systems. One of the most common types of deformable mirror is a bimorph design which uses two plates of piezo-material to which single electrodes are connected. These electrodes form the actuator array and their layout defines the resulting performance of the mirror to some extent. In the end all types of deformable mirrors currently used use an actuator array of some sort. To estimate the significance and effect of different actuator layout and shapes of actuators, an experimental study was performed. Four different commonly used actuator arrays were compared using photo-controlled deformable mirror. Using such device allows to study the effect of actuator layout separately from all other effects, since the device remains the same including all its imperfections. The experimental results are compared with numerical simulations and discussion is presented.