Applying sensitivity compensation for pyramid wavefront sensor in different conditions

We present simulation results of modal sensitivity compensation, a method to improve pyramid wavefront sensor (P-WFS) performance in high wavefront distortion regime. It has been shown that an alternative reference signal subtraction is able to dramatically improve the algorithm performance (0.30 in terms of Strehl ratio at 1.6 &mgr;m). In addition, we illustrate the limitations of the algorithm: high spatial sampling of the measured phase is needed and robustness issues are confronted at the low flux regimes. In a comparison with a Shack-Hartmann sensor the sensitivity compensated P-WFS is shown to perform at least as well (outside the high noise cases).