Wavefront sensor sampling plane fabricated by maskless grayscale lithography

Abstract

In this work we report the design and characterization of a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sampling plane based on a microlens array (MLA) composed of 12 X 12 hexagonal contiguous diffractive lenslet, with 355 μm pitch, 4.5 mm focal length, and 4.3 X 4.3 mm lateral dimensions. The device was fabricated by maskless grayscale lithography based on Digital Light Projector (DLP) technology. Optical characterization was performed in order to measure wavefront aberrations in Zernike polynomials terms. Intraocular lenses were used as test elements because they yield well-known optical aberrations, such as defocus and spherical aberration. For the wavefront reconstruction, the modal approach was used, in which the first derivatives of Zernike polynomials are used as the set of orthogonal basis functions. The corresponding polynomial coefficients up to the first 10 Zernike terms were obtained and the resulting reconstructed wavefront presents an RMS reconstruction error compliant to most optical systems of interest.