Nutronics, Inc. - Adaptive Optics Requirements Test Assembly

Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, Nutronics, Inc . is a company that engineers electro-optical solutions for problems in laser propagation due to atmospheric turbulence. Established in 1995, Nutronics develops technologies to combat optical turbulence for both the civil and military markets.

An optical wave propagating through atmospheric turbulence will experience irradiance fluctuations, also known as scintillation, due to a small index of refraction fluctuations (for instance, optical turbulence). Nutronics offers products in four areas to combat this:

1. The company produces high-quality AO systems for applications with a cooperative or point source target such as those needed for Free Space Optical (FSO) Communication.
2. The company engineers heavy-duty AO systems for applications with non-cooperative extended targets.
3. The company creates optical phased-array beam steerings controlled by wavelength.
4. The company designs diagnostic systems that analyze customer’s issues using modeling and simulation tools.

Stemming from his early projects while in the US Air Force, Nutronics CEO Jeffrey Barchers is a proponent of using the idea of Strehl or Wavefront Error Budget calculation to visual and quantify the performance of an adaptive optical system. This method is useful for singling out and fixing assembly failures.

Nutronics utilizes this methodology in its AORTA (Adaptive Optics Requirements Test Assembly) diagnostic system. Nutronic’s AORTA system is ideal for wave optical simulation data or high-resolution wavefront sensor data. AORTA operates without sacrificing spatial or temporal sampling.

1. randolph gills
2. Posted on December 17, 2014
3. military applications

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