High-precision Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing with a multi-focal diffraction Taiji-lenslet array

A Hartmann wavefront sensor is a type of wavefront detection instrument that has been widely used in various fields. Traditional Hartmann wavefront sensors usually comprise a monofocal refraction lenslet array to segment the wavefront at the entrance pupil. Each wavelet is focused at the focal plane along the projection of the lenslet, forming the foci array. Unlike the multifocal self-interference Taiji-lenslet array, a type of multifocal diffraction Taiji-lenslet array was proposed in this study to improve the measurement accuracy using the weighted centroid location algorithm of these multifocal spots, where the latter is more easily designed than the former. An optical experiment was implemented using the multifocal diffraction Taiji-lenslet array to verify its effectiveness. As a type of diffractive lens, a large-aperture Taiji-lenslet array can be easily fabricated via lithography, which has great potential for application in the measurement of large-scale laser beams and optical elements.

Fully Convolutional Approaches for Numerical Approximation of Turbulent Phases in Solar Adaptive Optics

Information on the correlations from solar Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensors is usually used for reconstruction algorithms. However, modern applications of artificial neural networks as adaptive optics reconstruction algorithms allow the use of the full image as an input to the system intended for estimating a correction, avoiding approximations and a loss of information, and obtaining numerical values of those correlations. Although studied for night-time adaptive optics, the solar scenario implies more complexity due to the resolution of the solar images potentially taken. Fully convolutional neural networks were the technique chosen in this research to address this problem. In this work, wavefront phase recovery for adaptive optics correction is addressed, comparing networks that use images from the sensor or images from the correlations as inputs. As a result, this research shows improvements in performance for phase recovery with the image-to-phase approach. For recovering the turbulence of high-altitude layers, up to 93% similarity is reached.

EUV and Hard X-ray Hartmann Wavefront Sensing for Optical Metrology, Alignment and Phase Imaging

For more than 15 years, Imagine Optic have developed Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) and X-ray Hartmann wavefront sensors for metrology and imaging applications. These sensors are compatible with a wide range of X-ray sources: from synchrotrons, Free Electron Lasers, laser-driven betatron and plasma-based EUV lasers to High Harmonic Generation. In this paper, we first describe the principle of a Hartmann sensor and give some key parameters to design a high-performance sensor. We also present different applications from metrology (for manual or automatic alignment of optics), to soft X-ray source optimization and X-ray imaging.

Binary Amplitude Reflection Gratings for X-ray Shearing and Hartmann Wavefront Sensors

New, high-coherent-flux X-ray beamlines at synchrotron and free-electron laser light sources rely on wavefront sensors to achieve and maintain optimal alignment under dynamic operating conditions. This includes feedback to adaptive X-ray optics. We describe the design and modeling of a new class of binary-amplitude reflective gratings for shearing interferometry and Hartmann wavefront sensing. Compact arrays of deeply etched gratings illuminated at glancing incidence can withstand higher power densities than transmission membranes and can be designed to operate across a broad range of photon energies with a fixed grating-to-detector distance. Coherent wave-propagation is used to study the energy bandwidth of individual elements in an array and to set the design parameters. We observe that shearing operates well over a ±10% bandwidth, while Hartmann can be extended to ±30% or more, in our configuration. We apply this methodology to the design of a wavefront sensor for a soft X-ray beamline operating from 230 eV to 1400 eV and model shearing and Hartmann tests in the presence of varying wavefront aberration types and magnitudes.