Tip tilt mirror

A tip-tilt mirror is an example of an optic that evolves dynamically in response to external commands. Arroyo currently supports a simple model for the temporal evolution of a tip-tilt mirror. In this model, the mirror moves from its current orientation towards its requested orientation with constant angular velocity. If the mirror reaches the requested orientation before a new command is issued, it stops instantaneously. If it does not, the mirror instantaneously changes direction and begins to move towards the new requested orientation with constant angular velocity. The angular velocity is a parameter that may be specified by the library user. The mirror aperture is a template parameter, and may be chosen from one of several shapes. Naturally one could write more sophisticated models for the tip-tilt mirror either within or outside the Arroyo library. Here is a movie showing a plane wave incident on a tip tilt mirror with a circular aperture. The plane wave had an electromagnetic wavelength of 1 micron. In this movie, the mirror was commanded to move cyclically through three orientations. These orientations were chosen to be equispaced on a circle with an amplitude of .5 arcseconds. New commands were issued every 50 milliseconds. Three different angular velocities were chosen for this demonstration: 52, 17.32, and 5.77 arcsec/sec, and the resulting plane waves are displayed from left to right. The intermediate value is the one for which the mirror completes its move just as a new command is issued. The two other values correspond to angular velocities 3 times faster and 3 times slower than this critical value.

Tip-tilt mirror simulation

This demonstration was generated using the program tip_tilt_mirror_verification, which is included in the Arroyo distribution.