Twisted-nematic liquid-crystal-on-silicon adaptive optics aberrometer and wavefront corrector

Abstract

A Hartmann-Shack wavefront sensor (HSWS) has been proven to be a reliable tool for the quantitative analysis of human ocular aberrations. In an active adaptive optics (AO) system, it has the role to monitor wave aberrations. To ensure the exclusive retrieval of Zernike coefficients for the measured ocular wavefronts, we first nullify the AO system's aberrations. This is of particular importance in our setup with a twisted-nematic (TN) liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) chip as the wavefront manipulator due to its strong unwanted zero-order diffractive beam. We characterize the AO system's performance-before and after ocular corrections-by means of different parameters, including experimental and simulated point spread functions (PSFs). An iterative closed-loop algorithm reduces the residual wavefront error to typical values of 0.1 mum. This system constitutes a wavefront corrector that can possibly be used for high resolution retinal imaging purposes or for visual psychophysical experiments.