High-performance optical differentiation wavefront sensing towards freeform metrology.

We report the demonstration of freeform optics metrology with an optical differentiation wavefront sensor that relies on spatially dithered distributions of binary pixels to synthesize a far-field amplitude filter. Analysis of experimental results and comparison with a commercial low-coherence-length interferometer shows that freeform phase plates with different magnitude of wavefront slopes can be accurately characterized. RMS accuracy of ∼ λ/10 and precision of ∼ λ/70 at 633 nm were achieved with pixelated filters having 2.5-µm pixels. Simulations that describe the characterization of a freeform optical component in the presence of photodetection noise and filter nonlinearity demonstrate the robustness of this wavefront-sensing approach for freeform optics characterization.