A wavefront error ripple of period generates a pair of speckles at angular displacement . Combining this with gives the deformable-mirror control radius along an actuator row or column:
A square actuator lattice has a square ideal frequency region: . Its full width is , approximately diffraction-limited resolution elements per side, or in area. The circular subset within the row-direction radius contains approximately such elements. The primary aperture shapes each speckle's point spread function; it does not turn the square sampling limit into a circular one.
This full square describes phase-error control. Simultaneous amplitude and phase correction with a single pupil-plane deformable mirror generally requires restricting the dark region to a half-plane; it is a different constraint from the sampling bandwidth.