Quantitative Sensing of Full-Wavefront Parameters using Metasurface

Rapid and accurate access to complete wavefront information is essential for advancing in the field of light science. Recent advances in metasurfaces have led to the swift development of compact quantitative phase and polarization imaging techniques. However, the concurrent retrieval of intensity, phase, and polarization information via meta-optic systems remains limited. Here, a meta-optics-based sensing architecture capable of simultaneously capturing the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light fields is proposed. It utilizes a multichannel metasurface with polarization-encoded quadrifocal phase to generate space- and polarization-multiplexed intensity patterns, then reconstructs the complex amplitudes of two spin components from longitudinal differentiation of intensity images via the transport of intensity equation, thereby achieves single-shot quantitative sensing of full-wavefront parameters. This non-interferometric architecture is compatible with and scalable to conventional imaging systems. Experimental results demonstrate its application in the high-accuracy, real-time, multidimensional characterizations of micro-optical elements and osteoblasts. This work offers distinct advantages for the analysis of biological tissues and materials that require concurrent phase and polarization measurements.