Single‐Shot Wavefront Sensing with Nonlocal Thin Film Optical Filters

Abstract

AbstractConventional wavefront sensors suffer from the fundamental limitation of the space‐bandwidth product and have a trade‐off between their spatial sampling interval and dynamic range. Here, nonlocal thin film optical filters with optimized angle‐ and polarization‐dependent responses are leveraged to circumvent the fundamental limitation, and a robust single‐shot wavefront sensing system with a small spatial sampling interval of 6.9 µm and a large angular dynamic range of 15° is realized. The system only requires inserting two multilayer dielectric filters, fabricated using a mature thin film deposition technique, into a conventional 4‐f imaging apparatus. The polarization‐sensitive nonlocal filters are used to map the 2D phase gradients of the incident light field to the intensity variation of the x‐ and y‐polarized light, respectively, thus enabling single‐shot 2D wavefront reconstruction from images taken by a polarization camera. Such a system may be used for a variety of applications, including high‐resolution image aberration correction, surface metrology, and quantitative phase imaging.