Wave front sensor

Abstract

A wave front sensor having a focusing optical system (1), a perforated diaphragm (2) with a plurality of perforations (21) situated simultaneously in the beam path (3), in an encoded arrangement, in particular according to and a cyclic Hadamard code, a device (22) for advancing the perforated diaphragm (2), so that a multiplicity of different encoded arrangements of perforations (21) are situated successively in the beam path (3). The entire cross section of the beam path (3) is repeatedly scanned overall with different encoded arrangements of perforations (21), a space-resolving light detector (41) which is disposed close to the focal plane (4) of the optical system (1), in particular a lateral detector with a spatial resolution in the nm range, which determines in each instance the position and intensity of the light spot (33) which results from the superposition of the plurality of beams (32) generated by the perforations (21), and a storage and computing unit (5), which reconverts the position and intensity values determined by the light detector (41), using the code of the arrangement of the perforations (21), into the phase and amplitude of the wave front.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.