Infrared Optimized AO System for a 15 - 20m Class Telescope

Despite the relatively large number of proposed 'extremely large telescopes' very few of them concentrate on the thermal infrared as their main operating wavelengths. An IR-optimized large telescope located in the Atacama dessert at about 5500m altitude, where many atmospheric windows in the mid-IR open up, would be ideal to study astronomical targets that are either intrinsically red or heavily obscured by dust. A large aperture in the order of 15 - 20m requires adaptive optics correction out to λ⩽20 μm with the least possible thermal emission from the instrument itself. Here we discuss a specialized, integrated AO system that provides diffraction-limited performance in the thermal infrared (at λ⩾2.5 μm). This approach is very different from the AO systems proposed for other 10m+ class telescopes. We present the basic concept of such an IR-optimized AO system, based on a 2m chopping adaptive secondary. We derive its technical specifications: configuration, bandwidth, and degrees of freedom show its predicted performance for typical seeing in terms of Strehl ratio as a function of limiting guide star magnitude, wavelength and corrected field-of-view. We also briefly address the science that this AO system/telescope would be ideal for.