Direct observation of atmospheric turbulence with a video-rate wide-field wavefront sensor

Turbulence is a complex and chaotic state of fluid motion. Atmospheric turbulence within the Earth’s atmosphere poses fundamental challenges for applications such as remote sensing, free-space optical communications and astronomical observation due to its rapid evolution across temporal and spatial scales. Conventional methods for studying atmospheric turbulence face hurdles in capturing the wide-field distribution of turbulence due to its transparency and anisoplanatism. Here we develop a light-field-based plug-and-play wide-field wavefront sensor (WWS), facilitating the direct observation of atmospheric turbulence over 1,100 arcsec at 30 Hz. The experimental measurements agreed with the von Kármán turbulence model, further verified using a differential image motion monitor. Attached to an 80 cm telescope, our WWS enables clear turbulence profiling of three layers below an altitude of 750 m and high-resolution aberration-corrected imaging without additional deformable mirrors. The WWS also enables prediction of the evolution of turbulence dynamics within 33 ms using a convolutional recurrent neural network with wide-field measurements, leading to more accurate pre-compensation of turbulence-induced errors during free-space optical communication. Wide-field sensing of dynamic turbulence wavefronts provides new opportunities for studying the evolution of turbulence in the broad field of atmospheric optics. A wide-field wavefront sensor consisting of a microlens array on the native image plane enables observation of atmospheric turbulence over a field of view of 1,100 arcsec at 30 Hz with an 80 cm telescope. With the aid of a neural network, turbulence can be predicted 33 ms in advance.