Open Access
6 June 2022 Predictive wavefront control on Keck II adaptive optics bench: on-sky coronagraphic results
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Abstract

The behavior of an adaptive optics (AO) system for ground-based high contrast imaging dictates the achievable contrast of the instrument. In conditions where the coherence time of the atmosphere is short compared with the speed of the AO system, the servo-lag error can become the dominant error term of the AO system. While the AO system measures the wavefront error and subsequently applies a correction (typically taking a total of one or a few milliseconds), the atmospheric turbulence above the telescope has changed resulting in the servo-lag error. In addition to reducing the Strehl ratio, the servo-lag error causes a build-up of speckles along the direction of the dominant wind vector in the coronagraphic image, severely limiting the contrast at small angular separations. One strategy to mitigate this problem is to predict the evolution of the turbulence over the delay time. Our predictive wavefront control algorithm minimizes, in a mean square sense, the wavefront error over the delay and has been implemented on the Keck II AO bench. We report on the latest results of our algorithm and discuss updates to the algorithm itself. We explore how to tune various filter parameters based on both daytime laboratory tests and on-sky tests. We show a reduction in residual-mean-square wavefront error for the predictor compared with the leaky integrator (the standard controller for Keck) implemented on Keck for three separate nights. Finally, we present contrast improvements for daytime and on-sky tests for the first time. Using the L-band vortex coronagraph for Keck’s NIRC2 instrument, we find a contrast gain of up to 2 at a separation of 3 λ  /  D and up to 3 for larger separations (3  −  7 λ  /  D).

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Maaike A. M. van Kooten, Rebecca M. Jensen-Clem, Sylvain Cetre, Sam Ragland, Charlotte Z. Bond, J. Fowler, and Peter L. Wizinowich "Predictive wavefront control on Keck II adaptive optics bench: on-sky coronagraphic results," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 8(2), 029006 (6 June 2022). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.8.2.029006
Received: 7 February 2022; Accepted: 20 May 2022; Published: 6 June 2022
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CITATIONS
Cited by 3 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Wavefronts

Adaptive optics

Coronagraphy

Control systems

Turbulence

Telescopes

Curium

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