Modeling pyramidal sensors in ray-tracing software by a suitable user-defined surface

Abstract. Following the unprecedented results in terms of performances delivered by the first light adaptive optics system at the Large Binocular Telescope, there has been a wide-spread and increasing interest on the pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS), which is the key component, together with the adaptive secondary mirror, of the adaptive optics (AO) module. Currently, there is no straightforward way to model a PWFS in standard sequential ray-tracing software. Common modeling strategies tend to be user-specific and, in general, are unsatisfactory for general applications. To address this problem, we have developed an approach to PWFS modeling based on user-defined surface (UDS), whose properties reside in a specific code written in C language, for the ray-tracing software ZEMAX™. With our approach, the pyramid optical component is implemented as a standard surface in ZEMAX™, exploiting its dynamic link library (DLL) conversion then greatly simplifying ray tracing and analysis. We have utilized the pyramid UDS DLL surface—referred to as pyramidal acronyms may be too risky (PAM2R)—in order to design the current PWFS-based AO system for the Giant Magellan Telescope, evaluating tolerances, with particular attention to the angular sensitivities, by means of sequential ray-tracing tools only, thus verifying PAM2R reliability and robustness. This work indicates that PAM2R makes the design of PWFS as simple as that of other optical standard components. This is particularly suitable with the advent of the extremely large telescopes era for which complexity is definitely one of the main challenges.