Enhanced-resolution Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensing for extended objects

Abstract

Adaptive optics systems for large-aperture solar telescopes, especially multiconjugate adaptive optics systems, suffer from a fundamental trade-off between wavefront sampling rate and sub-aperture resolution. We introduce an enhanced-resolution Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method that decouples sub-aperture resolution from the desired wavefront sampling rate. We experimentally verified the validity of this method. Results show that by synthesizing multiple low-spatial samplings, this method is capable to sense higher-frequency aberrations beyond any low-spatial sampling involved in the synthesis, and it allows higher sub-aperture resolution and higher operating bandwidths, which can better fulfill the needs of solar adaptive optics.