Adaptive Optics for Advanced Astrophysical Instrumentation

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Adaptive Optics (AO) equipped telescopes eliminate the optical blur, due to atmospheric turbulence, by monitoring the atmosphere's ever-changing turbulence and then "adapting" the optical system to compensate. These adaptations, achieved through the fast control of deformable mirrors, dramatically improve the resolution of the final image and allow large ground-based telescopes to reach their resolution limit, which is many many times better than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Early AO systems provided correction on a limited field of view (FOV), only a few tens of arcseconds on a side. While suitable for some astronomical inquiries it curtailed studies of larger objects, such as galaxies. Wide field AO systems produce corrections over a much larger FOV. Current thinking favours multi-conjugate AO (MCAO) for moderately correcting the entire FOV prior to distributing the signal to an instrument and multi-object AO (MOAO) for application within an instrument to provide exquisite correction around multiple scientific targets.***The proposed research program will focus on MOAO research utilizing a dedicated MOAO instrument (called RAVEN) that was designed and built at the University of Victoria Adaptive Optics Laboratory (UVicAOLab; 2009-to-2014). The RAVEN instrument ($6,177,274 Canada Foundation for Innovation award) is an engineering and science pathfinder for transformative wide-field AO technologies and was installed on the Subaru telescope in early 2014. Successful engineering and science runs were conducted in May and August 2014. Raven's MOAO system delivers images with roughly 0.15-arcsecond resolution - better than the typical 0.5-arcsecond achievable without AO.***The program is critically important for the next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs), such as the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT, diameter 25m) and Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT, diameter 39m). These telescopes will require the ability to produce AO corrections over a huge field of view. MOAO will be a critically important enabling technology for ELTs (where 20-science channel MOAO systems are being considered) and RAVEN acts as a 2-channel MOAO demonstrator instrument on the 8m Subaru Telescope. Graduate students and academic researchers at UVicAOLab (in partnership with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, NRC Herzberg, and Tohoku University) will utilize RAVEN's unique abilities to undertake an impressive research program that includes fundamental AO research (algorithm development, control systems, sensor technology, optical design and MOAO system performance improvement) and MOAO-based astronomy.**