Experimentally-determined performance limits for joint imaging and wavefront sensing with a photonic lantern

Abstract: The photonic lantern (PL) is a focal-plane wavefront sensor (WFS) that can be used for second-stage control of extreme adaptive optics (AO) systems. While the number of sensed modes and the dynamic range with respect to each mode have been relatively well characterized, little attention has been paid to the PL's sensitivity, i.e. how measurement noise impacts the accuracy of PL wavefront reconstruction. We compute the PL's sensitivity to photon noise as a function of spatial frequency, and compare it to existing WFSs, using simulations as well as experiments on the muirSEAL testbed. We further assess these metrics in the case where only a subset of PL ports are available for wavefront sensing. In this configuration, the remaining ports are used to spatially and spectrally reconstruct the observed scene using algorithms such as SPADE. Using more ports for wavefront sensing enables greater aberration sensitivity but leaves less spatial information for image reconstruction. This allows us to trade off between fewer samples with smaller aberrations and more samples with larger aberrations. This work sets the stage for AO system design incorporating the PL as a joint WFS and imager.