Single-Shot Wavefront Sensing with Nonlocal Thin Film Optical Filters

Abstract

Conventional 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.