Measuring the complex amplitude of wave fields by means of shear interferometry.

This paper presents a treatise on the determination of the complex amplitude of a monochromatic wave field from measurements obtained by a lateral shear interferometer. Both amplitude and phase distributions are recovered from the same set of measurements. Special consideration is given to the case of measurements with large shear. Here, the state of the art in the reconstruction of discontinuous wavefronts is extended by introducing a two-step process. In the first step, the phasors of the underlying wavefront are reconstructed across specific subsets of the measurement grid. In the second step, the individual reconstructions are combined by a novel (to the best of the author's knowledge) convolution approach in the Fourier domain, called residual phasor separation.