Experimental assessment of the matched filter for laser guide star wavefront sensing

Laser guide star wavefront sensing comes with several limitations. When imaged with a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, the laser guide star is seen as extended sources elongated in the directions given by the lenslet locations and the laser axis. A test bed has been built in the Adaptive Optics Laboratory of the University of Victoria that reproduces this effect as seen on extremely large telescopes. A new wavefront sensing algorithm, the matched filter, has been implemented and its performance assessed with the test bed. Its ability to mitigate laser guide star aberrations by tracking the sodium layer fluctuations in a closed loop adaptive optics system is shown. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America