Main description:

The 4th International Workshop on Adaptive Optics for Industry and Me- cine took place in Munster, Germany, from October 19 to October 24, 2003. The series of International Workshops on Adaptive Optics for Industry and Medicine beganwiththe?rstworkshopinShatura/Russiain1997,thesecond workshop took place in Durham/England in 1999, and the third workshop was held in Albuquerque/USA in 2001. The workshop series started out as a true grassroots movement and kept an informal spirit throughout all four workshops. Many personal friendships and scienti?c collaborations have been formed at these meetings. This fourth workshop was supposed to be held in Beijing, China. H- ever, the program committee decided in May 2003 to move the workshop to Munster due the general perception that the SARS (Severe Acute R- piratory Syndrome) cases reported in China could lead to a large epidemic. Despite this rather short notice the workshop in Munster was attended by about 70 people. Incidentally, the workshop coincided with the 50th anniv- sary of adaptive optics, because it was October 1953 when Horace Babcock published his famous paper "The possibilities of compensating astronomical seeing" in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Paci?c.

Contents:

Micromachined Membrane Deformable Mirrors.- The Development and Optimisation of High Bandwidth Bimorph Deformable Mirrors.- Deformable Mirrors with Thermal Actuators.- Technology and Operation of a Liquid Crystal Modal Wavefront Corrector.- Aberration Compensation Using Nematic Liquid Crystals.- Wireless Control of an LC Adaptive Lens.- Summary of Adaptive Optics at Stanford.- Control of a Thermal Deformable Mirror: Correction of a Static Disturbance with Limited Sensor Information.- A Novel Microprocessor-Controlled High-Voltage Driver for Deformable Mirrors.- Preliminary Investigation of an Electrostatically Actuated Liquid-Based Deformable Mirror.- Interferometer-Based Adaptive Optical System.- Extended Hartmann-Shack Wavefront Sensor.- High Resolution Wavefront Sensing.- Distorted Grating Wavefront Sensing in the Midwave Infrared.- Comparative Results from Shack-Hartmann and Distorted Grating Wavefront Sensors in Ophthalmic Applications.- Shack-Hartmann Sensors for Industrial Quality Assurance.- Single-Chip Neural Network Modal Wavefront Reconstruction for Hartmann-Shack Wavefront Sensors.- CMOS Technology in Hartmann-Shack Wavefront Sensing.- Generalised Phase Diversity Wavefront Sensor.- Generalised Phase Diversity: Initial Tests.- Prime Microlens Arrays for Hartmann-Shack Sensors: An Economical Fabrication Technology.- A Proposal for Wavefront Retrieval from Hartmann Test Data.- Use of Intracavity Adaptive Optics in Solid-State Lasers Operation at 1 m.- Intracavity Use of Membrane Mirrors in a Nd:YVO4 Laser.- Adaptive Optics for High-Power Laser Beam Control.- Aberrations of a Master-Oscillator-Power-Amplifier Laser with Adaptive Optics Correction.- Dynamic Aberrations Correction in an ICF Laser System.- Adaptive Shaping of High-Power Broadband Femtosecond Laser Pulses.- Wavefront Measurement and Adaptive Optics at the PHELIX Laser.- ISTC Projects from RFNC-VNIIEF Devoted to Improving Laser Beam Quality.- Adaptive Optical System for Retina Imaging Approaches Clinic Applications.- Adaptive Optics to Simulate Vision with a Liquid Crystal Spatial Light Modulator.- Confocal Scanning Retinal Imaging with Adaptive Optics.- A High-Resolution Adaptive Optics Fundus Imager.- Perceived Image Quality Improvements from the Application of Image Deconvolution to Retinal Images from an Adaptive Optics Fundus Imager.- Adaptive Aberrometer for Acuity Measurements and Testing.- Adaptive optics with strong scintillation and optical vortices for optical communication.- Wavefront Measurement over an Extended Horizontal Path Using a Wavefront Curvature Sensor.- The Detection of Atmospheric Tip-Tilt and its Program Construction in Lunar Laser Ranging.