A wavefront curvature sensor is a device for measuring the aberrations of an

optical Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...

wavefront In physics, the wavefront of a time-varying '' wave field'' is the set ( locus) of all points having the same '' phase''. The term is generally meaningful only for fields that, at each point, vary sinusoidally in time with a single temporal fr ...

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Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor A Shack–Hartmann (or Hartmann–Shack) wavefront sensor (SHWFS) is an optical instrument used for characterizing an imaging system. It is a wavefront sensor commonly used in adaptive optics systems. It consists of an array of lenses (called l ...

it uses an array of small lenses (or lenslets) to focus the wavefront into an array of spots. Unlike the Shack-Hartmann, which measures the position of the spots, the curvature sensor measures the intensity on either side of the focal plane. If a wavefront has a phase curvature, it will alter the position of the focal spot along the axis of the beam, thus by measuring the relative intensities in two places the curvature can be deduced.

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* * {{cite journal, last=Roddier, first=François, author2=Roddier, Claude , title=Curvature Sensing and Compensation: A New Concept in Adaptive Optics, date=March 1988, series=European Southern Observatory Conference and Workshop Proceedings, pages=1223–5, editor1-first=M. H., editor1-last=Ulrich, bibcode=1988ESOC...30..667R, volume=30, journal=Very Large Telescopes and Their Instrumentation, issue=7, doi=10.1364/AO.27.001223, pmid=20531543 Sensors Optical instruments Optical metrology

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