Miniature Deformable Mirrors Bring Adaptive Optics Within Reach
In 1953, astronomer Horace W. Babcock of California Institute of Technology in Pasadena proposed a method to compensate for atmospheric and figure aberrations in the optical path of telescopes. In his approach, a rotating knife edge placed in front of an orthicon would serve as a wavefront sensor, and a mirror coated with a thin layer of oil would act as a deformable optical element. The signal generated by the light on the orthicon would drive an electron gun, introducing a spatially varying...
Photonics Spectra, February 2005