Photonic lantern tip/tilt detector for adaptive optics systems
Daniel Cruz-Delgado, Juan Carlos Alvarado-Zacarias, Matthew A. Cooper, Steffen Wittek, Caleb Dobias, Julián Martínez-Mercado, José Enrique Antonio-Lopez, Nicolas K. Fontaine, Rodrigo Amezcua‐Correa
Abstract
In this work, we demonstrate a four-core multicore fiber photonic lantern tip/tilt wavefront sensor. To diagnose the low-order Zernike aberrations, we exploit the ability of the photonic lantern to encode the characteristics of a complex incoming beam at the multimode facet of the sensor to intensity distributions at the multicore fiber output. Here, we provide a comprehensive numerical analysis capable of predicting the performance of fabricated devices and experimentally demonstrate the concept. Two receiver architectures are implemented to discern tip/tilt information by (i) imaging the four-core fiber facet on a 2D detector and (ii) direct power measurement of the single mode outputs using a multicore fiber multiplexer and photodetectors. For both receiver schemes, an angular detection window of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mo>∼</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>0.4</mml:mn> <mml:mo>∘</mml:mo> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> at 1064 nm can be achieved. Our results are expected to further facilitate the development of intensity-based fiber wavefront sensors for adaptive optics systems.