Complex wavefront reconstruction with single-pixel detector

Wavefront sensing is an essential tool in wide research areas. However, the auxiliary reference beam and the pixel-array detector are indispensable in most of the wavefront sensing schemes. Here, we introduce a method to simultaneously measure the amplitude and the phase of an unknown complex wavefront using a single-pixel detector. A checkerboard pattern is used to sample the complex field and the reference beam, which makes sure that our scheme is free from the intensity distribution of the unknown complex amplitude field. In the experiments, various complex fields with discretized pixels of 64 × 64 and 128 × 128 at the corresponding pixel size of 109.44 × 109.44 μm2 and 54.72 × 54.72 μm2 are reconstructed. Using a high-speed digital micromirror device, we implement the complex wavefront reconstruction of 32 × 32 pixels with a frame rate of 6 Hz.