Abstract

Ferrrofluid deformable mirrors (FDMs) have demonstrated credible performance results that could make them useful in a variety of scientific applications. One of their main advantages is the high actuator stroke they can produce. While published results have shown FDM individual actuator strokes of near 60 µm in P-V wavefront amplitude, FDMs are not limited to this value but measuring higher actuator pokes has been difficult to demonstrate using standard commercial Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors. We describe here how we estimated larger actuator strokes by Fourier demodulation of the Shack-Hartmann spot images using basic MATLAB^® commands thus requiring no additional coding. Results show that individual actuator strokes produced by FDMs can be above the hundreds of microns of range in P-V wavefront amplitude.

© 2011 Optical Society of America