Wavefront Sensors
Technology Overview
A wavefront sensor (WFS) is an optical device that measures aberrations in an environment or within optical systems. Wavefront sensors work by measuring the wavefront aberration in a coherent signal.
A Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) is an optical instrument that measures wavefront errors using an array of lenses in front of a detector. For a perfectly flat wavefront, the location of the focused spots from the lens array is a regular grid. Deviations of the spot locations from this regular grid are used to determine the optical wavefront deformations or the errors in an optic or optical system.
Our WFSs are used in a variety of applications, including:
- Laser weapon system and adaptive optics component performance evaluation
- Optical Metrology
- Optical System Alignment
General Product Overview
AOS produces a variety of wavefront sensors specific to customer inputs. AOS is capable of customizing and integrating our specialized wavefront technology and software into nearly any camera (USB, POE, Camera-Link, CXP, etc.), thereby creating a world-class Wavefront Sensor. To compliment, the accompanying AOS AO Software enables customers to rapidly process wavefront sensor data.
Sharp
AOS also produces large aperture Hartmann or Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors to fulfill industry demand. Known as the AOS Shack Hartmann for Assessment of Response and Performance, or SHARP, it features a large format input customizable to 18” and beyond designed to enable measurement of the output of laser weapons systems directly. Light from the system is sampled by either a lens array (Shack-Hartmann architecture) or an aperture array (Hartmann architecture), propagated to a scatter screen at the focus of the lens array or at full diffraction from the aperture array. The scatter screen is then imaged onto a camera for processing with AOS’s standard wavefront sensor processing software. For high power operation, the SHARP system includes a large aperture sampling optic for leakage through a large aperture high reflectivity mirror.