Impact of telescope seeing on laser adaptive optics

Atmospheric turbulence in the internal light path of a telescope produces noncommon path phase differences that degrade the image quality of adaptive-optics systems employing laser guide stars. The spatial covariance and rms wavefront errors produced by this effect are derived. It is found that the tilt-removed wavefront error ranges from about 12 nm for a representative 30 m telescope to 59 nm for a 100 m telescope of similar optical design. For adaptive-optics systems that aim to derive tip-tilt information from the laser guide stars the error is considerably larger, ranging from 22 nm for the 30 m telescope to 256 nm for the 100 m telescope. This effect can be a significant impediment to the performance of such systems.