2016/05/20 by Feng Lu, Lu, Feng, Zhi-Xia Shen +19
Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1605.06205
openalex publication_date 2016/05/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Large telescope's adaptive optics (AO) system requires one or several bright artificial laser guide stars to improve its sky coverage. The recent advent of high power sodium laser is perfect for such application. However, besides the output power, other parameters of the laser also have significant impact on the brightness of the generated sodium laser guide star mostly in non-linear relationships. When tuning and optimizing these parameters it is necessary to tune based on a laser guide star generation performance metric. Although return photon flux is widely used, variability of atmosphere and sodium layer make it difficult to compare from site to site even within short time period for the same site. A new metric, coupling efficiency is adopted in our field tests. In this paper, we will introduce our method for measuring the coupling efficiency of a 20W class pulse sodium laser for AO application during field tests that were conducted during 2013-2015.