Wavefront distortion and beam pointing for LISA

The dc pointing directions for the LISA laser beams will be chosen to minimize the sensitivity of the measured arm lengths to jitter in the beam pointing. The earliest studies of the effects of wavefront distortion included only astigmatism and defocus, so that the desired dc beam pointing directions were on the axis for the transmitting telescopes. But, if other aberrations cause the dc pointing directions to be considerably off axis, some of the laser beam intensity will be lost. A brief study of this effect has been carried out. As examples, several cases with defocus, spherical aberration, and two components each of astigmatism and coma have been investigated. Within this class of models, pure astigmatism turned out to give the maximum sensitivity to beam pointing jitter, for a given rms wavefront distortion. Although further study is needed, it appears that the usually quoted requirements of 3 x 10(-8) rad for the dc beam pointing offsets and 8 x 10(-9) rad Hz (-1/2) for the pointing jitter are probably reasonable choices.