Testing highly aberrated large optics with a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor

We have adapted a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) to the measurement of highly aberrated large optics. The experiment uses a concave mirror operating at the radius point with a small lens to re-collimate the light onto the wavefront sensor. It is used to test large (300 mm) fused silica wafers in double pass transmission. The optic under test is placed in the intermediate path near the large return mirror. The aberrations of the large mirror, beam splitter and other optics are subtracted by recording a reference set of focal spot on the SHWFS without the wafer. The wavefront error for some of these wafers is nearly 100 waves, yet we are able to make accurate measurements with the wavefront sensor by selecting a sensor with the appropriate combination of focal length and lenslet diameter. The special sensor that we developed uses a megapixel camera with an arrangement of 100 X 100 lenslets. This sensor could achieve several hundred waves of dynamic range with better than λ/20 accuracy. Additional wafer thickness measurements that were made at NIST with the XCALIBIR interferometer corroborate the SHWFS results.