Extracting more than two orthogonal derivatives from a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show that the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) gives access to more derivatives than the two orthogonal derivatives classically extracted either by estimating the centroid or by taking into account the first two harmonics of the Fourier transform. The demonstration is based on a simple model of the SHWFS, taking into account the microlens array as a whole and linking the SHWFS to the multi-lateral shearing interferometry family. This allows for estimating the quality of these additional derivatives, paving the way to new reconstruction techniques involving more than two cross derivatives that should improve the signal-to-noise ratio.