AO4ELT5 Proceedings

End-to-end simulations of a near-infrared pyramid sensor on Keck II

Plantet, Cedric (INAF - Osservatorio di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy), Agapito, Guido (INAF - Osservatorio di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy), Giordano, Christophe (INAF - Osservatorio di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy), Esposito, Simone (INAF - Osservatorio di Arcetri, 50125 Firenze, Italy), Wizinowich, Peter (W. M. Keck Observatory, 65-1120 Mamalahoa Hwy., Kamuela, HI 96743, USA), Bond, Charlotte (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, 640 N. Aohoku Place, Hilo, HI 96720)

The future upgrade of Keck II telescope’s adaptive optics system will include a pyramid wavefront sensor working in the near-infrared (J and H band). It will benefit from the recently developed avalanche photodiode arrays, specifically the SAPHIRA (Selex) array, which provides a low noise (< 1 e- at high frame rates). The system will either work with a natural guide star (NGS) in a single conjugated adaptive optics system, or in a laser guide star (LGS) mode. In this case, the pyramid would be used as a low-order sensor only. We report on a study of the pyramid sensor's performance via end-to-end simulations, applied to Keck's specific case. We present the expected Strehl ratio with optimized configurations in NGS mode, and the expected residual on low orders in LGS mode. In the latter case, we also compare the pyramid to LIFT, a focal-plane sensor, demonstrating the ability of LIFT to provide a gain of about 2 magnitudes for low-order sensing.

DOI: 10.26698/AO4ELT5.0026- Proceeding PDF


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