WISH

Wavefront Sensing

Wavefront sensing is the simultaneous measurement of the amplitude and phase of an incoming optical field. Traditional wavefront sensors such as Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) suffer from a fundamental tradeoff between spatial resolution and phase estimation and consequently can only achieve a resolution of a few thousand pixels. To break this tradeoff, we present a novel computational-imaging-based technique, namely, the Wavefront Imaging Sensor with High resolution (WISH).

Paper

WISH: wavefront imaging sensor with high resolution

We replace the microlens array in SHWFS with a spatial light modulator (SLM) and use a computational phase-retrieval algorithm to recover the incident wavefront. This wavefront sensor can measure highly varying optical fields at more than 10-megapixel resolution with the fine phase estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this resolution is an order of magnitude higher than the current non-interferometric wavefront sensors. Our study suggests that the designing principle of WISH, which combines optical modulators and computational algorithms to sense high-resolution optical fields, enables improved capabilities in many existing applications while revealing entirely new, hitherto unexplored application areas.

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Wavefront Sensing

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Wavefront sensing is the simultaneous measurement of the amplitude and phase of an incoming optical field. Traditional wavefront sensors such as Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) suffer from a fundamental tradeoff between spatial resolution and phase estimation and consequently can only achieve a resolution of a few thousand pixels.

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Computational Phase-retrieval

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recent advances in the phase-retrieval algorithms and computational power enable us to efficiently solve large-scale optimization problems.

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High Resolution

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The spatial resolution of the recovered field is larger than 10 megapixels. In comparison with the traditional SHFWS, this is more than 1000× improvement in spatial resolution. Compared with other recent designs of wavefront sensors, WISH achieves more than 10× improvements in spatial resolution.