Design of an Optimized Adaptive Optics System With a Photo-Controlled Deformable Mirror

We present an experimental method for optimizing the performance of an adaptive optics system, where actuator's position, shape, and number of a deformable mirror can be arbitrarily selected. A home-made photo-controlled deformable mirror (PCDM) is used to test the performances of four different actuator layouts and to simulate an arbitrary wavefront corrector. In addition to numerical simulations, the experimental setup evaluates the performances of the entire adaptive optics system, including the wavefront sensor and the control algorithm. In order to demonstrate the potential of this adaptive optics system, we have benchmarked it with a laser thermal lens simulator.