Numerical study of a 20W class QCW pulsed sodium guide star laser's performances at five sites in China

Abstract

In the past few years, Chinese astronomical community is actively testing astronomical sites for several new optical/infrared ground-based telescopes. These site testing campaigns conducted were mainly focused on fundamental performances of the site, such as cloud coverage, seeing, temperature, etc. With increasing interests in sodium laser guide star adaptive optics for these new telescopes in the Chinese astronomical community, it is interesting to investigate the performance of the laser guide star at these sites, especially considering that the sodium laser guide star's on-sky performance is significantly influenced by sites' local performances, such as geomagnetic field, sodium layer dynamics, density of air molecule, etc. In this paper, we studied sodium laser guide star's performance of a 20W class Quasi-CW pulsed laser developed by TIPC with numerical simulation for five selected sites in China.