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.