Visible and Infrared Wavefront Sensing detectors review in Europe - part I

The purpose of this review is to give an overview of the state of the art wavefront sensor detectors developments held in Europe for the last decade. A major breakthrough has been achieved with the development by e2v technologies of the CCD220 between 2004 and 2012. Another major breakthrough is currently achieved with the very successful development of fast low noise infrared arrays called RAPID. The CCD220, a 240x240 pixels 8 outputs EMCCD (CCD with internal multiplication), offers less than 0.2 e readout noise at a frame rate of 1500 Hz with negligible dark current. The OCAM2 camera is the commercial product that drives this advanced device. This system, commercialized by First Light Imaging, is quickly described in this paper. An upgrade of OCAM2 is currently developed to boost its frame rate to 2 kHz, opening the window of XAO wavefront sensing for the ELT using 4 synchronized cameras and pyramid wavefront sensing. Since this major success, new detector developments started in Europe. The NGSD CMOS device is fully dedicated to Natural and Laser Guide Star AO for the E-ELT with ESO involvement. The spot elongation from a LGS Shack Hartman wavefront sensor necessitates an increase of the pixel format. The NGSD will be a 880x840 pixels CMOS detector with a readout noise of 3 e (goal 1e) at 700 Hz frame rate. New technologies will be developed for that purpose: advanced CMOS pixel architecture, CMOS back thinned and back illuminated device for very high QE, full digital outputs with signal digital conversion on chip. This innovative device will be used on the European ELT but also interests potentially all giant telescopes. Additional developments also started in 2009 for wavefront sensing in the infrared based on a new technological breakthrough using ultra low noise Avalanche Photodiode (APD) arrays within the RAPID project. Developed by the SOFRADIR and CEA/LETI manufacturers, the latter offers a 320x240 8 outputs 30 microns IR array, sensitive from 0.4 to 3 microns, with 2 e readout noise at 1500 Hz frame rate. The high QE response is almost flat over this wavelength range. Advanced packaging with miniature cryostat using liquid nitrogen free pulse tube cryocoolers is currently developed for this program in order to allow use of this detector in any type of environment. Results of this project are detailed here. a e-mail : philippe.feautrier@obs.ujf-grenoble.fr, philippe.feautrier@firstlight.fr Third AO4ELT Conference Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes Florence, Italy. May 2013 ISBN: 978-88-908876-0-4 DOI: 10.12839/AO4ELT3.15019 Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes III