Adaptive mirrors for phase correction of the laser beam passed through an airway

The numerical simulation on determination of the necessary number of adaptive mirror’s actuators for a problem of the correction of phase distortions accumulated by a laser beam under its propagation through an airway has been carried out. For this purpose, a set of wavefronts of the laser radiation passed through the airway has been registered by a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. The stacked actuators’ response functions of 107- and 203-element adaptive mirrors have been experimentally determined as well. The dynamic range of adaptive mirrors’ actuators has been considered in calculations. It is established that the 203-element adaptive mirror is not suitable for correction of the registered aberrations due to the limited dynamic range. Meanwhile by means of 107-element adaptive mirror it is possible to obtain a corrected laser beam with the Strehl ratio St=0.65.