DU-GALL: Durham University - Generalised AO Laser Laboratory

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will require significant adaptive optics (AO) technology development. The AO development roadmap identifies various forms of laser guide star (LGS) AO, in particular, to be both challenging technologically and critical for the proposed ELT instrument suite. The innovation and difficulty of several crucial LGS AO technologies is indeed such that on-sky verification will be required. Whilst some verification will be provided by the VLT multi-LGS AOF (Adaptive Optics Facility), several key technologies will require prototyping on other facilities. We propose the development of a new laser AO test laboratory, DU-GALL, which will be usable both in the laboratory and on-sky on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope, and which will subsume our existing WHT laser AO test system, the Rayleigh Technical Demonstrator (RTD). DU-GALL's purpose will be to investigate laser guide star (LGS) adaptive optics technologies required for the E-ELT and future ESO and Gemini AO facility upgrades. We focus particularly on Laser Multi-Object AO and Laser Tomographic AO, but the proposed system will be inherently capable of testing other ELT AO roadmap technologies, and we propose this through collaborative links and FP7 funding. DU-GALL will provide key support for the UK in taking an important role in the next generation of LGS AO-optimised instrument design.