OPTICAL TURBULENCE GROUP
The Optical Turbulence Group research activity is focused on studies and problems related to the propagation of electromagnetic field in turbulent flows, in particular the atmospheric turbulence. The main fields of application are the ground-based astronomy, more precisely the high angular resolution (HAR) technics (adaptive optics and interferometry) and the free-space optical communication (FSOC). The atmospheric turbulence is indeed the main cause of deformation of the wavefront coming from the observed astronomical objects in space and/or lasers beams in satellite-Earth transmissions that appear with loss of spatial and angular resolution and stochastic fluctuations of the intensity at the focus of the telescope or in general of optical receiver systems.
The team has been responsible of national and international projects applied to telescopes of 8-10m class (LBT, VLT), new generation telescopes of class 30-40 m (ELT), new generation solar telescopes of class 4 m (EST) and extreme regions interesting for the astronomy such as the Antartide (Dome C).
MAIN R&D TOPICS
Modelling and forecast of the optical turbulence with atmospheric model of different nature (GCMs, non-hydrostatic atmospherical models, etc.)
Site testing and techniques for the optical turbulence measurement
Development of operational automatic systems for the forecast of the optical turbulence and atmospheric parameters relevant for the ground-based astronomy and the FSOC
Statistical techniques for the OT estimates: autoregression, machine learning, deep learning
OT effects on high-contrast imaging (HCI) in ground-based astronomy.