Wavefront estimation by phase diversity and compensation with a liquid crystal wavefront corrector

Nematic liquid crystal spatial light modulators (LC-SLMs) have been proposed as wavefront correctors for adaptive optics (a summary of which is described in ref. 1 and references therein). For example, at the last OSA/ESO meeting on adaptive optics in Garching (1995) we described a high-quality LC-SLM which had 69-direct driven pixels which was custom designed for adaptive optics applications2. Additional work has been done with the goal of producing a polarization insensitive LC-SLM which does not suffer the reduced efficiency of a device which only works with a single polarization3. This paper demonstrates successful application of an LC-SLM to wavefront compensation and the first successful application of phase diversity sensing4 to wavefront compensation, to the best of our knowledge.