Modal integration of Hartmann and Shack–Hartmann patterns

Abstract

Instead of measuring the wavefront deformations directly, Hartmann and Shack-Hartmann tests measure the wavefront slopes, which are equivalent to the ray transverse aberrations. Numerous different integration methods have been described in the literature to obtain the wavefront deformations from these measurements. Basically, they can be classified in two different categories, i.e., modal and zonal. In this work we describe a modal method to integrate Hartmann and Shack-Hartmann patterns using orthogonal wavefront slope aberration polynomials, instead of the commonly used Zernike polynomials for the wavefront deformations.