Photonic Integrated Circuits for Astronomy: A Mathematical Description of an Integrated Photonics-Based Wavefront Sensor (IP-WFS)

Integrated photonics is an emerging field that has been of interest to numerous scientists and engineers in recent years. This field has enabled a wide range of applications, such as fibre optic communications, quantum computing or artificial intelligence. More specific applications of this technology can be found in a variety of astrophysical instruments. These technologies provide new functionalities within a remarkably small space and aim to reduce the cost and consumption and enhance performance. One of the major limitations of traditional wavefront sensors (WFS) used in solar adaptive optics (AO), such as Shack-Hartmann (SH) or plenoptic cameras, is the requirement to form an image of the Sun with a minimum resolution in order to compute and correct wavefront aberrations. To overcome this boundary, this work presents a mathematical description based on the scattering matrix of a wavefront sensor grounded in the integrated photonics (IP-WFS) for solar telescopes.