Hot forming of a large deformable mirror facesheet

Conventionally, facesheets for deformable mirrors (DM) are manufactured through grinding, polishing and finishing of a piece of optical glass. Due to the amount of material that needs to be removed, the required surface form errors and the complex handling of the fragile product throughout all manufacturing steps, this is a lengthy, risky and...

Deformable mirrors: Design fundamentals for force actuation of continuous facesheets

Adaptive Optics is established as essential technology in current and future ground based (extremely) large telescopes to compensate for atmospheric turbulence. Deformable mirrors for astronomic purposes have a high number of actuators (> 10k), a relatively large stroke (> 10µm) on a small spacing (< 10mm) and a high control bandwidth (> 100Hz)....