A wave-front sensor is described that uses a programmable moving aperture to scan an incoming wave front. The position of the diffraction spot is recorded behind an objective lens with a two-dimensional sensor and gives an estimate of the local slope at the aperture position. Then the wave front is reconstructed by processing of the slope data. The device is basically a programmable Hartmann wave-front sensor. Compared with a microlens Shack–Hartmann wave-front sensor, its much longer focal length provides higher resolution, although real-time operation is lost. A practical implementation of the new scanner with a liquid-crystal television as the programmable aperture is presented.

© 1999 Optical Society of America

[Optical Society of America ]

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Citation lists with outbound citation links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Article level metrics are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

Related Journal Articles

• Wave-front measurements of terawatt-class ultrashort laser pulses by the Fresnel phase-retrieval method (JOSAB)
• Theory of branch-point detection and its implementation (JOSAA)
• Phase retrieval for undersampled broadband images (JOSAA)
• Power dependence of dispersion-managed solitons for anomalous, zero, and normal path-average dispersion (OL)
• Liquid-Crystal Hartmann Wave-Front Scanner (AO)

Related Conference Papers

• Analysis of Geometric Wavefront Sensing
• Polarization Effects in Coherence-Gated Wave-Front Sensing
• Wavefront sensing with a flexible detector geometry using an array of binary holograms
• Adaptive Characterization of Few-cycle Wavepackets with High-Pulse-Fidelity Time-Wavefront Sensors
• Optical 3D Profiling by Partitioned Aperture Wavefront Imaging