Abstract
We present a new all-digital technique to extract the wavefront of a structured light beam. Our method employs non-homogeneous polarization optics together with dynamic, digital holograms written to a spatial light modulator to measure the phase relationship between orthogonal polarization states in real-time, thereby accessing the wavefront information. Importantly, we show how this can be applied to measuring the wavefront of propagating light fields, over extended distances, without any moving components. We illustrate the versatility of the tool by measuring propagating optical vortices, Bessel, Airy and speckle fields. The comparison of the extracted and programmed wavefronts yields excellent agreement.
Highlights
Optical aberrations are inevitable in most optical systems, leading to the quest for efficient and precise measurement techniques of the phase or wavefront of an optical field
We propose that our approach could be combined with a current wavefront extraction technique known as modal decomposition [16, 17, 36]
We have presented a new approach to conventional Stokes polarimetry that results in an all-digital, adjustment-free measurement of the wavefront of propagating structured light beams
Summary
Optical aberrations are inevitable in most optical systems, leading to the quest for efficient and precise measurement techniques of the phase or wavefront of an optical field. Some conventional and state-of-the-art methods to extract the wavefront of an optical field exist, ranging from ray tracing [9], pyramid sensors [10], interferometers [11,12,13,14], the Shack-Hartmann sensor [15], to the use of correlation filters [16] via modal decomposition [17] These techniques are often over-complicated and some of them are unable to detect phase singularities due to an absence of light at the singularity. Apart from implementing Stokes polarimetry to investigate phase singularities, it can be used to study polarization singularities in coherent beams [22,23] and stochastic electromagnetic beams [24,25] as well as partially coherent radially polarized beams [26] by using the spectral Stokes parameters [27] These techniques can reconstruct closely spaced singularities, they require the manual adjustment of various optical components for the extraction of the Stokes parameters. No study to date has measured wavefronts of propagating fields over extended distances in real-time
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