Theory of Airy-Beam Wavefront Sensing

A new wavefront sensing framework based on the interference of counter-accelerating Airy beams is presented. An engineered cubic phase function transforms a single Gaussian beam into two coherent Airy beams with opposite transverse accelerations, which self-recombine during free-space propagation to form an interference pattern encoding the aberrated incident wavefront. Numerical simulations demonstrate accurate recovery of the aberrated exit-pupil phase across the aberration sets considered, with a root-mean-square phase reconstruction error below 10-6;rad for the aberration set shown and consistently low errors for the other sets, while maintaining accurate recovery in the presence of measurement noise. The approach eliminates collection optics and enables a compact wavefront-sensing architecture for applications where conventional interferometric systems are difficult to implement, including electron-optical systems, augmented and virtual reality systems.