Adaptive optics imaging system based on a high-resolution liquid crystal on silicon device

An adaptive optics imaging system is introduced in this paper. A high resolution liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) device was used as a phase only wave front corrector instead of a conversional deformable mirror. The wave front aberration was detected by a Shack-Hartmann (SH) wave front sensor, which has lambda/100 rms wave front measurement accuracy. Under this construction 0.09lambda (lambda=0.6328microm) Peak to Valley correction precision was reached. Further more, some low frequency hot convection turbulence induced by an electric iron was compensated in real time at the same precision. The Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) of this system was also measured before and after wave front correction. Under the active correction of LCOS, the system reached the diffraction limited resolution approximately 65l p/mm on the horizontal direction. All of this showed the ability of using this device in high resolution, low temporal turbulence imaging system, such as retinal imaging, to improve the resolution performance.