Mach-Zehnder diffracted beam interferometer.

We use a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with two afocal systems to generate the interference between an image and a diffracted copy of a test beam. The interference data is inserted in an iterative algorithm for phase retrieval. We carry out a numerical study of the performance of this wavefront reconstruction technique with simulated data and we present also experimental results obtained using several lenses as test objects.