Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Performance Comparison Of Shearing Interferometer And Hartmann Wave Front Sensors, Timothy L. Pennington

Theses and Dissertations

The resolution of optical imaging systems is severely degraded from the diffraction limit by the random effects of the atmosphere. Techniques exist to compensate for the atmospheric turbulence, one of which is adaptive optics. A critical component in the adaptive optics system is the wavefront sensor. Presently, two types of sensors are being used-the Hartmann-Shack Wavefront Sensor and the Shearing Interferometer. Previous studies have compared these two sensors and found them to perform identically for a point source. However, to date, no comparison has been performed for an extended source and subaperture spacing larger than the correlation length of the …

Far Infrared Fourier Transform Spectroscopy Using Ring Interferometer, Changqing Qiu

Theses

A circular mirror interferometer named ring interferometer, which was designed by Dr. K.D. Moller, was built and set up for far-infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy. The ring interferometer has ten circular mirrors with the same area. By applying Fraunhofer diffraction theory, the calculation shows that the ring interferometer will have large diffraction angle range compared with lamellar grating interferometer which has rectangular mirrors with same width. Therefore the ring interferometer will be more efficient than lamellar grating in far-infrared spectroscopy. The experimental results show that this ring interferometer will work as expected.

In addition, a "home made" helium cooled detector was …