Engineering Commons^™

Wavefront Sensor, Richard Mulé

Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Theses

Wavefront reconstruction techniques have enabled important scientific improvements to corrective imaging in astronomy, optometry, and elsewhere. Here, we describe the design of a wavefront reconstruction-based adaptive optics system designed at Santa Clara University (SCU) in the Department of Physics. Our compact system is based on a modified Shack-Hartmann sensor design and can detect wavefront disturbances on the order of tens of nanometers. The full SCU system includes a 635 nm laser, a collimating lens pair, two mirrors, a microlens array, and a commercial CCD camera. The CCD data is analyzed using a least-squares reconstruction algorithm. Here, we present preliminary wavefront …