  As we enter the era of TESS and JWST, instrumentation that can carry out
radial velocity measurements of exoplanet systems is in high demand. We will
address this demand by upgrading the UC Lick Observatory's 2.4-meter Automated
Planet Finder (APF) telescope with an adaptive optics (AO) system. The AO
upgrade will be directly integrated into the APF telescope by replacing the
telescope's static secondary mirror with a 61-actuator adaptive secondary
mirror (ASM) to minimize the disturbance to the spectrograph optics. This
upgrade is enabled by The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific
Research's (TNO) large-format deformable mirror technology, which will be
constructed using a new style of high-efficiency hybrid-variable reluctance
actuator. We outline the technical design and manufacturing plan for the
proposed APF AO upgrade and simulate the improvement to the science yield using
HCIpy. Our simulations predict the AO upgrade will reduce the PSF instabilities
due to atmospheric turbulence, concentrating the light on the spectrograph slit
by a multiplicative factor of more than two (doubling the telescope's observing
efficiency) for targets as dim as I = 14. When completed, the APF adaptive
secondary mirror will be among the first pairings of an ASM with a radial
velocity spectrograph and become a pathfinder for similar AO systems in
telescopes of all sizes.
