High-accuracy wavefront sensing by phase diversity technique with bisymmetric defocuses diversity phase

We investigate a specific diversity phase for phase diversity (PD) phase retrieval, which possesses higher accuracy than common PD, especially for large-scale and high-frequency wavefront sensing. The commonly used PD algorithm employs the image intensities of the focused plane and one defocused plane to build the error metric. Unlike the commonly used PD, we explore a bisymmetric defocuses diversity phase, which employs the image intensities of two symmetrical defocused planes to build the error metric. This kind of diversity phase, named PD-BD (bisymmetric defocuses phase diversity), is analysed with the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). Statistically, PD-BD shows smaller CRLBs than the commonly used PD, which indicates stronger capacity of phase retrieval. Numerical simulations also verify that PD-BD has higher accuracy of phase retrieval than the commonly used PD when dealing with large-scale and high-frequency wavefront aberrations. To further affirm that PD-BD possesses higher accuracy of wavefront sensing than PD, we also perform a simple verification experiment.