Technology and applications of micromachined adaptive mirrors

Abstract

The end of the cold war and the introduction of military technologies to the market has created new application fields for many originally military technologies. One of these technologies is adaptive optics, dealing with dynamic control of the quality of an optical system. As for almost any technology `imported' from the military research field, adaptive optics is expensive. Fortunately there are many civil applications for adaptive optics which produce the necessary development thrust.