The Software Package PAOLAC: an embedment of the analytical code PAOLA within the CAOS problem-solving environment

We present the Software Package PAOLAC (“PAOLA within Caos”) in its first distributed version. This new numerical simulation tool is an embedment of the analytical adaptive optics simulation code PAOLA (“Performance of Adaptive Optics for Large (or Little) Apertures”) within the CAOS problem-solving environment. The main goal of this new tool is to allow an easier and direct comparison between studies performed with the analytical open-loop code PAOLA and studies performed with the end-to-end closed-loop Software Package CAOS (“Code for Adaptive Optics Systems”), with the final scope of better understanding how to take advantage from the two approaches: one analytical allowing extremely quick results on a wide range of cases and the other extremely detailed but with a computational and memory costs which can be impressive. The practical implementation of this embedment is briefly described, showing how this absolutely does not affect any aspect of the original code which is simply directly called from the CAOS global graphical interface through ad hoc modules. A comparison between end-to- end modelling and analytical modelling is hence also initiated, within the specific framework of wide-field adaptive optics at Dome C, Antarctica.