High Speed Micro-Machine Device for Adaptive Correction of Aero-Optic Effects

Current adaptive optical 1 systems which provide wavefront correction operate at or below 100 Hz, a frequency response suitable for correcting atmospheric effects for such applications as ground-based astronomy1. These systems are limited to such low frequency operating bandwidths by the speed of the processing and drive electronics, and the large, slow, deformable mirror devices utilized by these system designs. SY Technology, Inc. has developed a micro-machine based, high frequency, adaptive device which, when inserted into the proposed interferometric design, will have the potential to correct wavefronts at frequencies of hundreds of kilohertz2. This tremendous bandwidth is achieved by a device fabricated using photolithographic techniques, with its drive electronics controlled through light-addressed circuitry (see Figure 1). In this paper, a closed-loop adaptive, interferometric micro-machine device to correct for aero-optic effects is described and demonstrated3.