Patent ID: 8725471

Claim:
An optical testbed system for evaluating the performance of an optical component in a turbulent atmosphere, the system comprising: a computer processor with instructions for generating a time varying wavefront representing atmospheric turbulence and for inputting the time varying wavefront as a sequence of phase screens to a liquid crystal spatial light modulator; a display screen operably connected to the computer processor, wherein in operation, the display screen displays a plurality of alternative methods of generating each phase screen, the methods including a Karhunen-Loeve polynomial based method, a Zernike polynomial based method, and a frozen seeing method; and a user input device for receiving from a user and inputting to the computer processor a user-selected one of the methods, wherein the Karhunen-Loeve polynomial based method includes generating the wavefront according to: Wavefront ⁡ ( ρ , θ ) = ∑ i ⁢ ( 1 + X i ⁡ ( t ) ) ⁢ a i ⁢ K i ⁡ ( ρ , θ ) , wherein for each mode i, a i is the amplitude of the aberration determined based on the Zernike-Kolmogorov residual errors, K i (ρ,θ) is the Karhunen-Loeve polynomial for a radius and angular location (ρ,θ), (1+X i (t)) is the temporal function of the noise factor, and t is time.