Adaptive phase aberration correction based on imperialist competitive algorithm

We investigate numerically the feasibility of phase aberration correction in a wavefront sensorless adaptive optical system, based on the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA). Considering a 61-element deformable mirror (DM) and the Strehl ratio as the cost function of ICA, this algorithm is employed to search the optimum surface profile of DM for correcting the phase aberrations in a solid-state laser system. The correction results show that ICA is a powerful correction algorithm for static or slowly changing phase aberrations in optical systems, such as solid-state lasers. The correction capability and the convergence speed of this algorithm are compared with those of the genetic algorithm (GA) and stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm. The results indicate that these algorithms have almost the same correction capability. Also, ICA and GA are almost the same in convergence speed and SPGD is the fastest of these algorithms.