[Erin, Daniel] 

Last Friday, Daniel and I pressed the end mirror mount to try to get different wavefronts from the mirror. The three 'shapes' the mirror is able to produce are a kind of X, an O, and a + (see the third row of Zernike polynomials below for what they look like). We just tried to produce X and the O, since they are the two most straight foward. 

We first took a starting measurement of the mirror with the Shack-Hartmann sensor. This is just to make sure that pressing the mirror still allows us to return to its original state after (it should, this was just a precaution). 

To press in the X, the four screws in the back (side facing us when you look at the table) were engaged (turned until they made contact with the mirror), and two screws in the front were. One suggestion was to place a multimeter on the mirror and the screw so that we could determine exaclty when the screw makes contact with the mirror. Unfortunately, since the entire mount is metal, this will cause the multimeter to short, so this probably won't work. Instead we found it was effective to lightly twist the screwdriver, holding it closer to the screw to apply less torque. After the screws were engaged, we turned them about 45 degrees, since 1mD of curvature is supposed to correspond to 5 degrees of turning (according to the COMSOL simulation. Then we took an image with the Shack-Hartmann sensor. 

After that, we disengaged the screws and took another image. Then, in order to press the O, we enaged 4 screws both in the front and in the back and turned each of the screws 360 degrees. 

Then we disengaged and took a final image. One challenge that might come up is adjusting the modes of the mirror without moving it relative to the sensor or changing the tilt. We found we had to adjust the mirror after pressing it cause it could easily get bumped. Analyzing the data is still in progress, I have a way to reconstruct the wavefront, calculate the radius of curvature, and the next step is to find a way to overlay the engaged and disengaged images to see how the Shack-Hartmann data changes between them.