Abstract
The central topic of this workshop is how to use and generate artificial beacons as the reference source for adaptive optics systems. Beacons generated by resonant scattering of sodium atoms in the mesosphere are attractive for large telescopes because the size of telescope that can be corrected at a given wavelength with a single beacon scales as its height. However, efficient generation of a compact sodium beacon is harder to achieve than for a Rayleigh beacon generated at lower altitudes due to the physics of the sodium atom in the layer and the difficulty of building suitable lasers. I will discuss the physics of the sodium atom in this talk, and the physics of lasers in the next.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kibblewhite, E.J. (2000). The Physics of the Sodium Atom. In: Ageorges, N., Dainty, C. (eds) Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics for Astronomy. NATO ASI Series, vol 551. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9624-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9624-4_3
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