Wavefront sensor

A wavefront sensor is a device for measuring the aberrations of an optical wavefront. Although an amplitude splitting interferometer such as the Michelson interferometer could be called a wavefront sensor, the term is normally applied to instruments that do not require an unaberrated reference beam to interfere with. They are commonly used in adaptive optics systems, lens testing and increasingly in ophthalmology.

There are several types of wavefront sensors, including:

• Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor
• Phase-shifting Schlieren technique
• Wavefront curvature sensor
• Pyramid wavefront sensor
• Common-path interferometer
• Foucault knife-edge test
• Multilateral shearing interferometer
• Ronchi tester
• Shearing interferometer