Position and displacement sensing with shack-hartmann wave-front sensors

The use of a Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensor as a position-sensing device is proposed and demonstrated. The coordinates of a pointlike object are determined from the modal Zernike coefficients of the wave fronts emitted by the object and detected by the sensor. The position of the luminous centroid of a moderately extended incoherent flat object can also be measured with this device. Experimental results with off-the-shelf CCD cameras and conventional relay optics as well as inexpensive diffractive microlens arrays show that axial positioning accuracies of 74 microm rms at 300 mm and angular accuracies of 4.3 microrad rms can easily be achieved.