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<title>Antares Beam Alignment System Performance</title>

1983; SPIE; Volume: 0380; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1117/12.934763

1996-756X

Q. D. Appert, S.C. Bender,

Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing

The beam alignment system for the 24-beam-sector Antares CO 2 fusion laser automatically aligns more than 200 optical elements. A visible-wavelength alignment tecnnique is employed which uses a telescope/TV system to view point-light sources appropriately located down the beamline.. The centroids of the light spots are determined by a video tracker, which generates error signals used by the computer control system to move appropriate mirrors in a closed�loop system. Final touch-up alignment is accomplisned by projecting a CO2 alignment laser beam through the system and sensing its position at the target location. Tne techniques and control algorithms employed have resulted in alignment accuracies exceeding design requirements. By employing video processing to determine the centroids of diffraction images and by averaging over multiple TV frames, we achieve alignment accuracies better than 0.1 times system diffraction limits in the presence of air turbulence.