Wavefront-aberration sorting and correction for a dual-deformable-mirror adaptive-optics system.

Many next-generation adaptive optics (AO) systems for vision will have two deformable mirrors (DMs) instead of one: a high-stroke, low-resolution mirror (the woofer) and a low-stroke, high-resolution mirror (the tweeter). We developed a zonal wavefront-control algorithm and validated it using simulations. Rather than separating the woofer and tweeter corrections into two independent control processes or using a modal decomposition, the algorithm we proposed uses wavefront slope measurements from a single Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor to generate control signals for both deformable mirrors within a single zonal control. A Lagrange multiplier is chosen to integrate two DMs into a single-DM wavefront control, and a damped least-squares control is employed to suppress the correlation between the two DMs.