Laser produced planar mini flyer generation has widely gained importance owing to its wide ranging applications in the field of condensed matter, astrophysics, material research, shock phenomenon, etc. Flattop smooth laser beam profile as driver is the primary requirement for planar flyer generation besides special multilayered target geometry. We present here laser produced thin metallic planar mini-flyer generation using a fiber optic plate (FOP) of 8 mm thickness and about 6 µm fiber dimension. This technique is unique in the sense that it doesn't require large length as compared to optical fiber. A Gaussian shape laser beam from a laser oscillator was allowed to fall on the FOP generating a speckle pattern. This pattern was relayed and amplified using lenses and laser amplifiers to achieve energy of about 400 mJ. The beam was focused on a substrate (fused silica) based multilayered target on which flyer disks of different materials such as Al. Cu, Br, and Ta were attached. Velocities as high as 400 m/s was measured for Al flyer of 1.5 mm diameter and thickness 50 µm. Flyer disks were completely recovered after the laser shot. We also present a theoretical analysis along with experimental results of the laser beam smoothing technique using a He-Ne laser and FOP. Each channel of the FOP acts as a small single mode optical fiber. The basic idea was to divide the incoming coherent beam into many beam-lets introducing random distribution in length or/and diameter of optical fibers of FOP. The individual FOP channel acts as a diverging source because of single mode fiber with natural divergence λ/d. However, due to the small randomness in length or diameter, the individual diffraction sources are not in phase. This results in the generation of speckles in both near (Fresnel) and far field (Fraunhoffer) destroys the spatial coherence of the beam.

The effects of photon noise, aliasing, wavefront chromaticity and scintillation on the PSF contrast achievable by ground-based adaptive optics (AO) are evaluated for different wavefront sensing schemes. I show that “classical” AO (sensing in the visible, imaging in the near-IR) is limited to about $10^5$ PSF contrast in the central arcsecond because of scintillation chromaticity.

This comparative study shows that a focal-plane based wavefront sensor (WFS), combining wavefront sensing and scientific imaging on the same detector is optimal for high contrast imaging. This approach combines high WFS sensitivity, immunity to aliasing and non common path errors and optical design simplicity. Its theoretical performance is compared to commonly used WFSs, illustrating the advantages of this technique.

I show that such a system can be efficiently used as a second stage after a low-order AO system. Control and data reduction algorithms are presented, as well as possible optical designs incorporating a coronagraph. A laboratory demonstration of this technique is currently being done at Subaru Telescope.

Lucy's algorithm is applied to iterative blind deconvolution method. This new approach enables to reconstruct a greatly extended object from one speckle frame and to reinforce image domain constraints. A greatly extended object makes speckle images flow over detecting surface. Lucy's algorithm is accommodated to handle such an image and built into iterative blind deconvolution methods. Computer simulation and observational data analyses are conducted and the effectiveness of the proposed methods are exemplified.

We made aperture masking optical interferometry experiments using up to 30 apertures and with a tip-tilt correction of wavefront error. We examined the performance of minimum redundant configurations of 11–30 sub-apertures on the pupil plane mask. These configurations have two advantages; the redundancy noise is as small as realized in non-redundant masking method, and the uv-coverage is as high as in speckle interferometry enabling to get reconstructed images without mask exchange. We also examined the effect of tip-tilt wavefront correction within a telescope pupil in front of the aperture masking optics. The light coherency between sub-apertures was shown to increase by the correction.

Unlike their radio counterparts, optical astronomers have paid relatively little attention to the role of the aperture function when designing their high resolution imaging experiments. This is despite the fact that it can be easily modified with the use of a suitable pupil plane mask. While the defining characteristics of the two most favoured pupil configurations have never been in doubt – negligible atmospheric noise in the case of a non-redundant configuration of small holes and high photon rates for a filled pupil – the relative merits of these two choices in terms of imaging performance in the presence of turbulence appear not to have been carefully investigated until very recently.

Most existing comparisons of fully-filled aperture (FFA) and non-redundant mask (NRM) based imaging strategies appear to have ignored a number of fundamental and practical difficulties that are often encountered in practice. In the intermediate regime, between very high and very low light levels, that characterizes most astrophysical applications hybrid imaging schemes seem most profitable. These utilize partially-redundant pupil geometries that combine the advantages of redundancy at low light levels without incurring the penalties associated with fully redundant beam recombination. Such pupil geometries are also useful in reducing the level of systematic effects that often plague speckle imaging experiments.