Segmented bimorph mirrors for adaptive optics: morphing strategy

This paper discusses the concept of a light weight segmented bimorph mirror for adaptive optics. It focuses on the morphing strategy and addresses the ill-conditioning of the Jacobian of the segments, which are partly outside the optical pupil. Two options are discussed, one based on truncating the singular values and one called damped least squares, which minimizes a combined measure of the sensor error and the voltage vector. A comparison of various configurations of segmented mirrors was conducted; it is shown that segmentation sharply increases the natural frequency of the system with limited deterioration of the image quality.