Options
2014
Conference Paper
Titel
Influence of each Zernike aberration on the propagation of laser beams through atmospheric turbulence
Abstract
We study the influence of each Zernike mode on the propagation of a laser beam through the atmosphere by two different numerical methods. In the first method, an idealized adaptive optics system is modeled to subtract a certain number of Zernike modes from the beam. The effect of each aberration is quantified using the Strehl ratio of the longterm exposure in target/receiver plane. In the second method, the strength of each Zernike mode is varied using a numerical space-filling design during the generation of the phase screens. The resulting central intensity for each point of the design is then studied by a linear discriminant analysis, which yields to the importance of each Zernike mode. The results of the two methods are consistent. They indicate that, for a focused Gaussian beam and for certain geometries and turbulence strengths, the hypothesis of diminishing gains with correction of each new mode is not true. For such cases, we observe jumps in the calculated criteria, which indicate an increased importance of some particular modes, especially coma. The implications of these results for the design of adaptive optics systems are discussed.