The cost of adaptive optics technology is dominated by the cost of current deformable mirror technology which has a range of price going from $2K to $15K per channel. Liquid crystal technology promises to be at least a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper. Liquid crystals offer other advantages such as reliability, low power consumption and with a huge technological momentum based on a wide variety of industrial applications. In this paper we present some preliminary characterizations of a new, large format liquid crystal device. Such devices have the potential for extremely high-resolution wave-front control due to the over 10,000 corrective elements.

Date Published: 20 March 2003
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 4884, Optics in Atmospheric Propagation and Adaptive Systems V, (20 March 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.462439

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4884:
Optics in Atmospheric Propagation and Adaptive Systems V
Anton Kohnle; John D. Gonglewski, Editor(s)