Membrane deformable mirrors based on magnetic actuators have been known for years. State-of-the-art deformable mirrors usually have large strokes but low bandwidth. Furthermore, this bandwidth decreases with the diameter. In this paper, we present the results of a new actuator principle based on magnetic forces allowing high bandwidth (up to a few kHz), very large stroke (>30μm) with a record pitch of 1.5mm. The benefits of this technology will be presented for three applications: astronomy, vision science and microscopy. The parameters of the mirrors have been tuned such that the inter-actuator stroke of the deformable (more than 2.0μm) in order to fit the atmosphere turbulence characteristics. In vision science, efforts have been made to correct both simultaneously the low and high order aberrations (more than 45μm of wavefront correction on astigmatism and focus). Finally, we will demonstrate how we have developed a deformable mirror able to correct spherical aberrations (microscopy). The last part of the article is devoted to give some perspectives about this technology.

Date Published: 18 February 2010
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 7595, MEMS Adaptive Optics IV, 75950Q (18 February 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.848238

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7595:
MEMS Adaptive Optics IV
Scot S. Olivier; Thomas G. Bifano; Joel A. Kubby, Editor(s)