Paper
11 July 2018 Estimation of polarization aberrations and its effect on the point spread function of the Thirty Meter Telescope
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a future generation telescope proposed to be located in Mauna Kea, Hawaii or in La Palma in the Canary Islands. The telescope will have a segmented primary and an inclined tertiary mirror. The segmentation of the primary mirror and the inclination in the tertiary mirror can introduce significant polarization aberrations. Typically, the polarization aberrations, introduced due to the mirror coating and the high incident angles cause small modifications to the Point Spread Function (PSF). Here, we perform the polarization ray tracing for TMT using the optical design software Zemax for different input polarizations for a point source (on-axis). We calculate the diattenuation and retardance aberration maps for all the three mirrors of TMT. The coating induced astigmatism obtained from the retardance of the primary and secondary mirror is found to be of the order of 0.048 radians, whereas, the polarization induced tilt by the retardance of the tertiary mirror is in the order of 0.29 radians. The Jones pupil maps are estimated at two of the instrument ports, Wide Field Optical Spectrograph (WFOS) and Narrow Field Infrared Adaptive Optics System (NFIRAOS).The Amplitude Response Matrix (ARM) estimated at the WFOS port show the presence of ghost PSF's. The magnitude of the ghost PSF components is of the order of 2.5 x 10-5 at 1μm at WFOS port. The ARM and the Point Spread Matrix (PSM) are estimated at the focus of the NFIRAOS instrument. The Stokes PSF is shown for horizontal and vertical polarization as inputs. The Huygen's point spread function obtained from Zemax shows the variations in FWHM for unpolarized and polarized inputs. These estimations would help in the design aspects of a high contrast imaging instrument for the TMT in the future.
© (2018) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Ramya M. Anche, G. C. Anupama, S. Sriram, K. Sankarasubramanian, and Warren Skidmore "Estimation of polarization aberrations and its effect on the point spread function of the Thirty Meter Telescope", Proc. SPIE 10703, Adaptive Optics Systems VI, 107034K (11 July 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2312506
Lens.org Logo
CITATIONS
Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
Advertisement
Advertisement
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS
Get copyright permission  Get copyright permission on Copyright Marketplace
KEYWORDS
Mirrors

Polarization

Point spread functions

Telescopes

Coating

Thirty Meter Telescope

Adaptive optics

RELATED CONTENT

INO340 active optics algorithm
Proceedings of SPIE (August 26 2022)
Coating-induced wavefront aberrations
Proceedings of SPIE (December 11 1992)
Integrated model of the Carlina Telescope
Proceedings of SPIE (November 10 2011)

Back to Top