Theory of Airy-Beam Wavefront Sensing

Abstract:A new wavefront sensing framework based on the interference of counter-accelerating Airy beams is presented. An engineered cubic phase function transforms a single Gaussian beam into two coherent Airy beams with opposite transverse accelerations, which self-recombine during free-space propagation to form an interference pattern encoding the aberrated incident wavefront. Numerical simulations demonstrate accurate recovery of the aberrated exit-pupil phase across the aberration sets considered, with a root-mean-square phase reconstruction error below $10^{-6} \mathrm{\;rad}$ for the aberration set shown and consistently low errors for the other sets, while maintaining accurate recovery in the presence of measurement noise. The approach eliminates collection optics and enables a compact wavefront-sensing architecture for applications where conventional interferometric systems are difficult to implement, including electron-optical systems, augmented and virtual reality systems.

Optics (physics.optics); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2609.28050 [physics.optics]

(or arXiv:2609.28050v1 [physics.optics] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28050 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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