Predictive correction of frozen-flow atmospheric turbulence in multi-conjugate adaptive optics

The imaging quality of ground-based telescopes is degraded by the presence of atmospheric turbulence. Adaptive optics is the process of correcting in real-time turbulence induced wave-front aberrations, typically by changing the surface shape of a number of deformable mirrors in the optical path, and by measuring the wave-front with one or more wave-front sensors. Due to the large number of coupled inputs and outputs in these systems and the linear nature of the underlying physical phenomena, a linear control scheme is typically used to transform the wave-front sensors’ measurements into command signals for the deformable mirrors. The goal of this thesis is to utilise prior assumptions of atmospheric turbulence in order to closely approach the maximum performance capabilities of linear control schemes in adaptive optics. We achieve this by extending existing predictive estimation strategies in adaptive optics to be able to adapt to real-time variations in system parameters and to effectively correct for atmospheric wave-front variations at time-scales shorter than the wave-front sensing component of the control loop.