Thermal stability test and analysis of a 20-actuator bimorph deformable mirror

One of the important characteristic of adaptive mirrors is the thermal stability of surface flatness. In this paper, the thermal stability from 13℃ to 25℃ of a 20-actuator bimorph deformable mirror is tested by a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. Experimental results show that, the surface P-V of bimorph increases nearly linearly with ambient temperature. The ratio is 0.11 μm/℃ and the major component of surface displacement is defocused, compared with which, astigmatism, coma and spherical aberration contribute very small. Besides, a finite element model is built up to analyse the influence of thickness, thermal expansion coefficient and Young＇s modulus of materials on thermal stability. Calculated results show that bimorph has the best thermal stability when the materials have the same thermal expansion coefficient. And when the thickness ratio of glass to PZT is 3 and Young＇s modulus ratio is approximately 0.4, the surface instability behaviour of the bimorph manifests itself most severely.

Analysing the structure of the optical path length of a supersonic mixing layer by using wavelet methods

The nano-particle-based planar laser scattering （NPLS） technique is used to measure the density distribution in the supersonic mixing layer of the convective Mach number 0.12, and the optical path difference （OPL）, which is quite crucial for the study of aero-optics, is obtained by post processing. Based on the high spatiotemporal resolutions of the NPLS, the structure of the OPL is ana]ysed using wavelet methods. The coherent structures of the OPL are extracted using three methods, including the methods of thresholding the coefficients of the orthogonal wavelet transform and the wavelet packet transform, and preserving a number of wavelet packet coefficients with the largest amplitudes determined by the entropy dimension. Their performances are compared, and the method using the wavelet packet is the best. Based on the viewpoint of multifractals, we study the OPL by the wavelet transform maxima method （WTMM）, and the result indicates that its scaling behaviour is evident.

Temporal evolution of the optical path difference of a supersonic turbulent boundary layer

The density distribution of a supersonic turbulent boundary layer is measured with the nanoparticle-based planar laser scattering technique, and the temporal evolution of its optical path difference （OPD） in a short time interval is characterized by proper orthogonal decomposition （POD）. Based on the advantage of POD in capturing the energy of a signal, a temporal evolution model is suggested for the POD coefficients of the OPD. In this model, the first few coefficients vary linearly with time, and the others are modeled by Gaussian statistics. As an application, this method is used to compute the shortexposure optical transfer function.

The co-phasing detection method for sparse optical synthetic aperture systems

Co-phasing between different sub-apertures is important for sparse optical synthetic aperture telescope systems to achieve high-resolution imaging. For co-phasing detection in such a system, a new aspect of the system＇s far-field interferometry is analysed and used to construct a novel method to detect piston errors. An optical setup is built to demonstrate the efficacy of this method. Experimental results show that the relative differences between measurements by this method and the criterion are less than 4%, and their residual detecting errors are about 0.01 A for different piston errors, which makes the use of co-phasing detection within such a system promising.

Amplified spontaneous emission and power amplification in high-power DF laser systems

Amplified spontaneous emission （ASE） always occurs in high-power DF laser systems with master oscillator-power amplifier （MOPA） configuration. ASE not only reduces the energy extraction efficiency of the laser system, but also negatively influences its heat management. The interaction between the ASE flux and the coherent laser flux, as well as the effect of ASE on cuboid DF amplifiers, is studied using a finite difference method and an iterative arithmetic. In addition, the influence of ASE on coherent laser amplification is discussed in detail.