Chapter 8 **A Unified Approach to Analysing the Anisoplanatism of Adaptive Optical Systems 191** Jingyuan Chen and Xiang Chang

Preface

and technology.

ence tomography, and laser processing.

porting theory and analysis.

applications of the devices.

images.

For over four decades there has been continuous progress in adaptive optics technology, theory, and systems development. Recently there also has been an explosion of applications of adaptive optics throughout the fields of communications and medicine in addition to its original uses in astronomy and beam propagation. This volume is a compilation of research and tutorials from a variety of international authors with expertise in theory, engineering,

The first section, Integrated Adaptive Optics Systems, contains a chapter by Zoran Popovic, Jörgen Thaung, Per Knutsson and Mette Owner-Peterson from Sweden that describes in great detail the challenges, system development, and success of high resolution retinal imag‐ ing. The second chapter in this section, Deqing Ren and Yongtian Zhu from China present a

The second section, Devices and Techniques, goes into more detail in various areas. Bonora, Zawadzki, Naletto, Bortolozzo, Residori describe a number of algorithms to assist an adap‐ tive optics system that does not directly use wavefront sensors. The Italian team show the principle applied to a number of applications such as conventional imaging, optical coher‐

A broad tutorial chapter by Chinese reseachers Xuan, Cao, Mu, Hu, and Peng presents an overview of liquid crystal technology with the applications to wavefront correction. The chapter describes many of the benefits as well as the limitations of liquid crystals with sup‐

Over the past 20 years, micromachined deformable membrane mirrors have been advancing rapidly, and because of their low cost, they have become commonplace. Europeans Thomas Ruppel et al. present a chapter to bring us up to date on the technology, manufacture, and

The final chapter of this section by Aubailly and Vorontsov discusses the limitations of con‐ ventional adaptive optics in terms of field-of-view and anisoplanatism. Then the American collaborators present a novel approach the does not use a wavefront measurement alone, but rather a measure of the entire received complex electromagnatic field to synthesize the

The third and last section to the volume, Optical and Atmospheric Effects, explores the ap‐ plication of adaptive optics to complex wave phonomena. Russian researchers Garanin, Starikov, and Malakhov present a discussion of optical vortices, showing how they appear

design and detailed performance analysis of a solar adaptive optics system.
