Analysis of the threshold sensitivity of a wavefront aberration sensor based on a multi-channel diffraction optical element

In this paper, we investigate a wavefront sensor based on the optical expansion of the analyzed field in the basis of Zernike functions using a multichannel diffractive optical element. Correlation peaks at the centers of diffraction orders correspond to the detection of specific aberrations in the analyzed field, and the peak intensity corresponds to the magnitude of the aberration. The analysis of the threshold sensitivity of the considered wavefront aberration sensor is carried out. In a number of numerical experiments, the threshold value of the sensitivity of the sensor under consideration was obtained. It turned out that when analyzing wavefront aberrations, spurious aberrations can be detected when the wavefront deviation exceeds a certain threshold value, and this value varies for each type of aberration.