Atmospheric Turbulence Simulator for Adaptive Optics Evaluation on an Optical Test Bench

An adaptive optics system can be simulated or analyzed to predict its closed-loop performance. However, this type of prediction based on various assumptions can occasionally produce outcomes which are far from actual experience. Thus, every adaptive optics system is desired to be tested in a closed loop on an optical test bench before its application to a telescope. In the close-loop test bench, we need an atmospheric simulator that simulates atmospheric disturbances, mostly in phase, in terms of spatial and temporal behavior. We report the development of an atmospheric turbulence simulator consisting of two point sources, a commercially available deformable mirror with a 12x12 actuator array, and two random phase plates. The simulator generates an atmospherically distorted single or binary star with varying stellar magnitudes and angular separations. We conduct a simulation of a binary star by optically combining two point sources mounted on independent precision stages. The light intensity of each source (an LED with a pin hole) is adjustable to the corresponding stellar magnitude, while its angular separation is precisely adjusted by moving the corresponding stage. First, the atmospheric phase disturbance at a single instance, i.e., a phase screen, is generated via a computer simulation based on the thin-layer Kolmogorov atmospheric model and its temporal evolution is predicted based on the frozen flow hypothesis. The deformable mirror is then continuously best-fitted to the time-sequenced phase screens based on the least square method. Similarly, we also implement another simulation by rotating two random phase plates which were manufactured to have atmospheric-disturbance-like residual aberrations. This later method is limited in its ability to simulate atmospheric disturbances, but it is easy and inexpensive to implement. With these two methods, individually or in unison, we can simulate typical atmospheric disturbances observed at the Bohyun Observatory in South Korea, which corresponds to an area from 7 to 15 cm with regard to the Fried parameter at a telescope pupil plane of 500 nm.