Reduction in the amount of crosstalk with reduced number of focal spot rows in a grating array based zonal wavefront sensor

Abstract

The Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWS), named after Johannes Franz Hartmann and Roland Shack, is one of the most well-known and popularly used optical wavefront sensor that finds numerous applications in various optical technologies. SHWS samples the incident wavefront by means of a lenslet array to produce an array of regular 2D array of focal spots on the detector plane of a digital camera, in the case of an unaberrated plane wavefront. If the incident wavefront is aberrated or deviates from a plane wavefront, the respective focal spots get shifted from its reference positions corresponding to the regular grid. If the incident wavefront aberration increases or has a very large curvature, the focal spot of one lenslet may enter the detector sub-aperture of the nearby lenslet. Thus, the SHWS has a limited dynamic range that is restricted to aberrations which do not allow the sub-images to be displaced out from their own detector sub-array. It makes the SHWS sensitive to cross-talk when higher order aberrations are present thereby unavoidably a ecting the wavefront estimation process. The array of tiny lenses of the SHWS can be replaced by an array of gratings followed by a focusing lens, generating an array of focal spots which is similar to that as in the case of a SHWS. In this paper, the spatial frequency of such a grating array based zonal wavefront sensor is configured to produce lesser number of rows of focal spots. The reduction in the number of focal spot rows reduces the amount of cross talk in the vertical direction. In this paper we present preliminary experimental results to demonstrate the above stated reduction in crosstalk.