We present a new type of adaptive lens with 18 actuators that can correct up the 4th order of aberration. The Multi-actuator Adaptive Lens (M-AL) can guarantee a good level of aberration correction for many applications and, with respect to deformable mirror, it allows the realization of more compact and simple optical systems. The adaptive lens is based on the use of piezoelectric actuators and, without any obstruction or electrodes in the clear aperture, can guarantee a fast response time, in the order of about 10ms. The clear aperture of the M-AL allows its use in “classical” Adaptive Optics configuration together with a wavefront sensor. To introduce a further simplification to the optical system design we show that the adaptive lens can be also driven with a wavefront sensorless control algorithm during in vivo optical coherence tomography of the human retina and for two-photon excitation fluorescence microscopy. In the experimental setup we used two aberration correcting devices a commercial adaptive lens (AL) with a high dynamic range to correct for defocus and the Multi-actuator Adaptive Lens (M-AL) to correct for the Zernike aberrations up to the 4th order. Experimental results show that the ocular aberrations of human eyes can be successfully corrected with our M-AL for pupils of 5mm and that retinal cones can be readily imaged.
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