Phase camera

The phase camera project falls within the planned upgrades for Advance Virgo and has been recognized as one of the most crucial diagnostic sensors within the adaptive optics department. Nikhef has already developed a first generation phase camera, which provides a hi-resolution measurement of laser wave-front aberrations. It is anticipated that the 1 Mega Watt of circulating laser power, planned for Advanced Virgo, will provide high thermal loading of optical components causing the mirror to deform and possibly degrade the detector performance. The information from the new phase camera will used in a feedback loop to counteract these thermal distortions.

The to-be-developed, second-generation, phase camera will use a combination of RF modulation/demodulation methods with state of the art time-of-flight CCD/CMOS technology to obtain high resolution, frequency selective wave-front sensing information from the Advanced Virgo detector. The challenges for this project lie in the development of real-time image acquisition and image recognition software for use in high performance laser metrology systems. The current systems make no use image recognition software or image statistics, which should increase the understanding of our detector and improve the duty-cycle of astrophysical observations.