Overview of multi-conjugate adaptive optics reconstructors
Abstract
Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems aim at correcting for the atmospheric turbulence uniformly over wide-field observations. Compared to classical AO, this requires a tomographic reconstruction of the turbulence perturbations, that is to say a reconstruction of the atmosphere in its volume, and the control of several deformable mirrors optically conjugated to various altitudes. During the last two decades, many tomographic reconstructors have been proposed in the AO literature and some have been implemented on sky on existing MCAO systems. This paper presents an overview of MCAO reconstructors. Four categories of reconstructors are considered: i) the reconstructors based on interaction matrix; ii) the minimum-variance static reconstructors; iii) the 3-step recontructors and iv) the Kalman-based reconstructors. We discuss their relative advantages and drawbacks.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{bechet2026overview,
title = {{Overview of multi-conjugate adaptive optics reconstructors}},
author = {Clémentine Béchet},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.02146},
eprint = {2609.02146},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02146},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Overview of multi-conjugate adaptive optics reconstructors
AU - Clémentine Béchet
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.02146
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02146
AB - Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems aim at correcting for the atmospheric turbulence uniformly over wide-field observations. Compared to classical AO, this requires a tomographic reconstruction of the turbulence perturbations, that is to say a reconstruction of the atmosphere in its volume, and the control of several deformable mirrors optically conjugated to various altitudes. During the last two decades, many tomographic reconstructors have been proposed in the AO literature and some have been implemented on sky on existing MCAO systems. This paper presents an overview of MCAO reconstructors. Four categories of reconstructors are considered: i) the reconstructors based on interaction matrix; ii) the minimum-variance static reconstructors; iii) the 3-step recontructors and iv) the Kalman-based reconstructors. We discuss their relative advantages and drawbacks.
ER -