UCSC Adaptive Optics Lab

The cutting edge of adaptive optics R&D is where the University of California, Santa Cruz, hopes to land with the help of a new laboratory for adaptive optics. The lab will be established with the largest private gift the university has ever received—$9.1 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The lab’s main research thrusts will be extreme adaptive optics and multiconjugate adaptive optics. “Extreme adaptive optics does very, very high precision corrections of turbulence in the atmosphere,” says the lab’s chief scientist, UCSC astronomer Claire Max. “The scientific aim is focused on directly imaging planets around nearby stars—it optimizes the imaging of something faint that is close to something that is bright. You could also look at brown dwarf companions to bright stars, disks beginning to form into planets, or disks accompanying star formation.” Multi-conjugate adaptive optics uses multiple deformable mirrors to compensate for the turbulence from different layers of the atmosphere. It is being developed for use with the new generation of 30- to 100-meter ground-based telescopes, says Max.

The lab will augment the campus’s Lick Observatory and multi-institutional NSF Center for Adaptive Optics, which focuses on adaptive optics for both astronomy and the human eye, says Max. “This lab will let us test ideas that people come up with before we decide whether they are ready to go on a telescope,” she adds.