What is a hologram?

Chapter 1 What is a hologram?

‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’
Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand
it myself, to begin with . . .’
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

To the physicist, a hologram is a record of the interaction of two mutually

coherent light beams, in the form of a microscopic pattern of interference fringes.
To the well-informed lay person, it is a photographic film or plate that has been
exposed to laser light and processed so that when illuminated appropriately it
produces a three-dimensional image. To the less well informed it is just some kind
of three-dimensional photograph. Certainly, both photography and holography
make use of photographic film or plates, but that’s about all they have in common.
The image is produced in a totally different way: you can’t even describe the way
the two types of image are formed in the same terms. You can show how a camera
lens produces an optical image using a simple ray diagram and basic geometry; but
to explain a holographic image you have to invoke the concepts of diffraction and
interference, and these are wave phenomena.

Stereoscopy
When you take a photograph, the image you get is two-dimensional. If you look at The reason, of course, is that nothing
it from an angle the only change you see is a foreshortening of the image. If this is changes in the image when you
a face looking at the camera, the eyes appear to be fixed on you, and they remain change your viewpoint, except that it
fixed on you when you move to one side. People sometimes express surprise at this, just becomes a little foreshortened
(squeezed up).
although painters understood the reason long before photography was thought of.
In contrast, when you look at a sculptured head the eyes look at you only when In a stereoscopic presentation two
you see the head from the front; when you move to the side your viewpoint views of a scene recorded from the
changes, but the eyes continue to look in the original direction. The image is positions of the two eyes (i.e. 6–7 cm
plainly endowed with depth. Even without your moving, each of your eyes sees a apart) are presented optically, one to
each eye. This may be achieved by an
slightly different image by virtue of its differing viewpoint; one of the clues to your
optical device, or by donning colored
perception of depth is your brain’s interpretation of these differences. Soon after
glasses; the effect is the same. Your
photography appeared, the idea of presenting two photographic images taken from brain interprets the discrepancies
appropriate viewpoints, one for each eye, led to the invention of the stereoscope by between the images in terms of
John Herschel and its commercial realization by Charles Wheatstone. depth.
Since then the popularity of stereoscopic presentation has fluctuated; but
stereoscopy continues to earn its keep in metrology, photogrammetry, and, most
notably, in aerial reconnaissance and survey.
A fair number of people, perhaps as many as one in five, have poor stereoscopic This is analogous to the effect you get
perception. Around one in twenty has none at all. Yet such people have no when you are listening to a stereo
difficulty in telling whether they are looking at a real object or a flat photographic recording on headphones; you can
record. The reason for this lies mainly in the phenomenon of parallax, the way that move around the room and the sound
stage moves with you. More
the view you see changes in appearance when you change your viewpoint. Even
disturbingly, if you swivel your head
with your head fixed and one eye closed, the small movements your eye makes in
the whole sound stage swings round
scanning the scene are sufficient to verify the solidity (or absence of solidity) of with it.
what you are examining. However, with stereoscopic pairs of photographs there is
no live parallax. At the showing of a stereoscopic film, everyone gets the same view

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 Practical Holography
Of these cues only stereopsis, and to
some extent convergence, are
represented in a stereoscopic pair of
photographs. The remainder, with the
important exceptions of parallax and
accommodation, are present in a
single photograph.
The most recent camera of this type
to appear was the Nimslo, with four
lenses. It was not a commercial
success.
For example, if you record the image
at 1/10 scale, its depth is reduced by
a factor of 100.
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Box 1.1
In real life there are seven visual cues involved in the perception of depth:
. Parallax: As you change your viewpoint the relative positions of objects
appear to change.
. Relative size: More distant objects appear smaller in proportion to near
objects.
. Aerial perspective: Subject contrast decreases with increasing distance, and
hues become bluish.
. Obscuration: Nearer objects overlap farther objects.
. Accommodation: You need to re-focus your eyes for objects at different
distances.
. Lighting contrast: Coarse contrast (modeling) and fine contrast (texture)
indicate the three-dimensionality of objects.
. Convergence: The axes of the eyes need to converge to fuse the images of nearer
objects.
. Stereopsis: Differences between the two images are recognized and interpreted
by the brain as depth in the scene.
as you do. If you move your head sideways when you are examining a stereoscopic
illustration in a book using colored glasses, your viewpoint of the scene doesn’t
change. The eyes of a portrait remain fixed on you, and the perspective stays
exactly the same.
One method of overcoming the lack of parallax, and at the same time avoiding the
necessity for wearing special glasses, is the parallax stereogram. The technique for
producing these involves moving a camera past the subject matter (or moving the
subject matter past the camera) while you take photographs at intervals of a few
degrees. You then need the resulting negatives to be printed on a single sheet of
print material, using a special optical printer that interlaces the images in narrow
vertical strips. After processing, the print is mounted under a fine lenticular screen
that allows you to see only a single image from any one viewpoint. You can view
the result without glasses and see genuine horizontal parallax over a limited range
of angles. Such autostereograms (i.e. stereoscopic images that you can view without
any optical aid) enjoy some success in the picture postcard industry, and from time
to time cameras embodying similar principles appear on the amateur market.
The images they produce are not always entirely convincing. Horizontal parallax is
certainly present, but the perspective often appears shallow, and figures and
backgrounds may appear like cardboard cutouts. One of the reasons for this
‘cardboarding’ effect (which also occurs in conventional stereoscopic pairs) is that
in the optical image formed by a camera lens the longitudinal scale of the image is
the square of its lateral scale. Only at 1 : 1 scale is the depth rendered truthfully.
However, provided you keep within certain distance limits (about 2–4 m for an
interlens separation of 6.5 cm), you can produce convincing stereoscopic effects
with just two photographs (Fig. 1a).
Any simple photograph is, of course, two-dimensional, yet the optical image
formed inside the camera was itself three-dimensional (Fig. 1.1b). If you form a
full-size image of an object such as a glass animal with a camera lens, and catch
this real image on a ground-glass screen, when you move the screen back and forth
 What is a hologram?

Figure 1.1 (a) This is a stereoscopic pair of photographs, showing David Pizzanelli holding the master hologram of the kitten that was the model for the cover
hologram of the first edition of Practical Holography. To view it in 3-D without a viewing aid, hold the book in front of you at a distance of about 45 cm (18 in),
look at a distant object above the book, then bring the book up into your line of sight. After a little practice you should be able to re-focus with your
eyes remaining aligned with the two photographs, and see the central image in 3-D. (b) The optical image produced by a lens is three-dimensional; a
ground-glass screen placed at any plane within the depth of the image will produce a two-dimensional image with the part intersected by the screen plane
appearing sharp.

you will see different parts of the image coming into focus successively. The image
has the same depth as the object (provided the scale is 1 : 1). If you remove the
screen you will see the whole image, hanging in the air. It is inverted, but has full
vertical and horizontal parallax, though as the diameter of the camera lens is less
than the distance between your eyes, you won’t be able to see it stereoscopically. It
is a fact that inside every camera is a three-dimensional image struggling to get
out. This, of course, is not news: Leonardo da Vinci knew it, and so did Galileo.
But is there any way of recording this image so that we can see it as it really is, in
three dimensions?

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 Practical Holography
In geometric optics, a ray is used to
indicate the direction of propagation
of a light wave, and in lens design it
provides graphical shorthand. This is
called ‘ray tracing’.
Depth of field is the distance between
the nearest and farthest planes that
give an image of acceptable
sharpness when the lens is focused
on a specified distance.
The frequency (strictly, temporal
frequency) of a wave is the number of
waves passing a given point in a
second. I discuss electromagnetic
radiation in detail in Chapter 3.
A wavefront is the locus of all points
in a light beam that are in the same
phase (see margin note, p. 9).
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Defining the problem
Stereoscopic photography, as we have seen, provides only a partial answer to the
question. Other systems involving arrays of microlenses or vibrating screens have
been tried, with varying degrees of success. But the only wholly successful
technique so far has been to move away from photography altogether and to look
at the problem in a different light – or rather, with a different model for the
behavior of light.
The ray model is generally used in photographic optics to describe the formation
of an optical image, to calculate such quantities as depth of field and angle of view,
and even to design lenses.
But the ray model is limited. It doesn’t correctly describe the way fine detail is
rendered in the optical image, even by a theoretically ideal lens: for example, it
doesn’t predict that fine detail in the image progressively disappears as the aperture
is closed down. Nor can the ray model tell us anything about polarization (see
p. 28), nor describe the special qualities possessed by laser light. For an
explanation of these phenomena we need to consider light as electromagnetic
radiation, as waves propagated through space in the same manner as radio waves.
Indeed, light does possess all the characteristics of radio waves; the only difference
is in its much higher frequency.
We can define the problem by analyzing what happens when we ‘see’ an object, in
terms of a wave model. When a previously undisturbed beam of light waves falls
on an object, the transmitted or reflected light is modified by it so that the
wavefronts, instead of being planes, become complicated (Fig. 1.2).
Now, the only information your eye receives concerning the object you are viewing
is contained in the part of the wavefront intercepted by the pupil of your eye. As
long as your eye and the object remain stationary the shape of the intercepted
wavefront remains unchanged, and the appearance of the object also remains
unchanged. But if you change your viewpoint your eye will intercept a different
portion of the wavefront: the information carried by this portion is different, and
you see a different view. This is the clue to the working of stereoscopic vision in
terms of the wave model: your two eyes intercept different portions of the object
wavefront, and thus see two different views. Stereoscopic photographs encode part
of the information contained in the two portions of the wavefront. Though
Figure 1.2 A plane wave diffracted by a transparent object (a) or an opaque one (b) becomes a highly
complicated wave carrying information about the object.
 What is a hologram?

admittedly only a part, the information is sufficient to provide the illusion of

depth. But the only way to provide all the information is to provide a
reconstruction of the entire wavefront. If this can be done, the experience of the
viewer will be precisely the same as if the object itself were present. The question is:
how can this be done?

The problem solved

Holography provides the answer. A hologram is a complete record of the Throughout this book, when I use the
information, and when correctly illuminated it generates a replica of the object term ‘image’, without qualification, I
wavefront, enabling you to see an image that in every respect replicates the object, mean the three-dimensional
with full parallax in all directions. representation of the subject matter
produced by a hologram or other
There is one proviso. The wavefront from the object gives us information not only optical device.
about the object but also about the illuminating source. In order to record the
A plane wavefront is the wavefront of
object information uncontaminated by information about the light source (which
a collimated (i.e. parallel) light beam.
could otherwise swamp it) the illuminating beam must contain no information at Monochromatic light is light of a
all; that is, it must consist of plane wavefronts. Such wavefronts are produced only single frequency. This ideal is
by a monochromatic point light source at infinity. approached by some lasers, but can’t
A filament lamp is out of the question: it is an extended source with a whole be totally achieved. The degree of
monochromaticity is specified by the
spectrum of wavelengths. Laser light, on the other hand, conforms closely to the
frequency bandwidth.
requirements. Light from a filament lamp and light from a laser can be compared
respectively to the longer-wave radiations from an electrical storm and those from
a radio beacon. In both cases the former emit radiation (light or radio waves) that
is random, traveling in all directions and containing all frequencies, whereas the
latter emit disciplined beams that contain only a narrow band of frequencies and
can be made highly directional (Fig. 1.3). They also possess an important property
called coherence, which I discuss in Chapter 3.

Figure 1.3 Ordinary white light (a) contains all wavelengths emitted more or less at random, like the random
radiation emitted by an electrical storm (b). The disciplined beam emitted by a laser (c) contains only a very
narrow band of wavelengths, which remain in phase for a considerable number of wavelengths, like the beam
of radio waves emitted by a broadcasting station (d).

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 Practical Holography
When two or more sets of waves
travel through the same space they
interact, and if they have the same
wavelength the interference pattern,
as it is called, is regular and
predictable. You may have seen
demonstrations of interference
patterns using water waves in a ripple
tank.
Don’t confuse this with the
‘interference’ you get from other radio
stations or from thunderstorms. That
is properly called noise. (You have
probably noticed that whenever I use
a precise technical term for the first
time I put it in italics. This is because
many of these specialized terms also
have generalized meanings in
everyday speech.)
You can obtain Fresnel biprisms from
educational suppliers.
If you can’t get hold of a short-focus
concave lens (about !5 or !10 mm),
you can use a 5 mm diameter ball
lens, or, at a pinch, a convex lens of
up to 50 mm, or a camera lens (but in
this case you may need a good deal
more room).
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Interference
To understand the way a hologram encodes the object wavefront we have to
introduce the concept of interference.
If you use a car radio when traveling, you will almost certainly have experienced
interference patterns with radio waves. Sometimes when you are passing through a
town the sound from your speakers begins to fade up and down in pulses. What is
happening is that you are receiving a signal directly from the transmitter, but you
are also receiving the signal after it has been reflected from a tall building. At one
point the two signals are in phase, i.e., the crests and troughs of voltage from the
two sources coincide and you get a strong signal. At another point a few metres
farther along the troughs coincide with the crests (the signals are in antiphase), and
the signal is cancelled out. Result: silence. This keeps repeating along your route
until one of the signals becomes too weak to have an effect. Figure 1.4 illustrates
this.
Figure 1.4 Multi-path interference in radio waves.
An experiment with interference fringes
The phenomena I have been discussing are called respectively constructive and
destructive interference.
The first demonstration of interference of light waves was by Thomas Young early
in the nineteenth century, using a pair of narrow slits, now known as Young’s slits,
illuminated by sodium light, which contains only a narrow band of wavelengths.
Because the slits had to be very narrow and the light source itself needed to be
masked down by a further slit, the interference pattern was very weak, and
Auguste Fresnel suggested using a device (now known as a Fresnel biprism),
consisting of a pair of very shallow wedge prisms made back to back from a single
piece of glass. The device causes the two halves of a beam of light to overlap. If
you use a laser pointer, with a concave lens to expand the beam a little, you can
see strong interference bars (usually called fringes).
You might like to try this experiment for yourself: it will give you considerable
insight into the way a hologram codes the information contained in the object
wavefront. Fix the lens to the front of the laser, and place the biprism with its
dividing line bisecting the disk of light vertically.
 What is a hologram?

Figure 1.5 Fresnel biprism experiment. (a) When both beams are undisturbed the interference pattern is a
row of parallel straight fringes. (b) Where an object is inserted, the fringe pattern becomes distorted. This
distortion contains all the information about the shape of the object wavefront.

Position a piece of white card (a postcard will do) about 1.5–2 m away, at a
distance where the two D-shaped beams overlap. Now turn the card about a
vertical axis until the overlapping patch is well drawn out (Fig. 1.5a).
You should now be able to see a series of vertical dark and light interference
fringes. The dark bands correspond to regions where the two waveforms are
‘Phase’ is the relationship between
interfering destructively; the bright bands correspond to regions where they are the position of the crest of a wave and
interfering constructively. The spacing of the bands will be a millimetre or so. a given reference point. It can be
Fig. 1.6a is a photograph of these fringes, at about twice actual size. You will specified in degrees or fractions of a
notice that they are straight and parallel. cycle, but is most often given in
radians (1 cycle ¼ 2! radians). Object
Now comes the crucial demonstration. Take a fine sewing needle, or a straight
beam and reference beam are
piece of wire (about 20 gauge), and embed one end in a cork at an oblique angle. standard terms used to describe
Place it in one of the two halves of the beam fairly close to the biprism, and respectively the beam reflected from
examine the fringe pattern again. You will see that they are still vertical overall, (or transmitted by) the object, and the
and equally spaced, but are kinked in a regular sort of way (Fig. 1.6b). This effect undisturbed beam falling directly on
is a direct result of the disturbance of the wavefront by the object. The amount of the plate or film.
disturbance of a fringe at any point is directly proportional to the disturbance, or
The term ‘hologram’ was coined by
change in phase, of the wavefront of what I shall from now on be calling the object Denis Gabor, the prefix ‘holo’ coming
beam, relative to the phase of the wavefront of the undisturbed or reference beam. from a Greek word meaning ‘whole’
If you now remove the needle and replace it by a more complicated object such as and the syllable ‘gram’ from another
Greek word signifying a visual
a small glass animal, which you may need to position closer to the screen
representation. The word ‘holograph’,
(Fig. 1.5b), you will see that the fringe pattern has become much more fragmented
which he might otherwise have coined
(Fig. 1.6c). Nevertheless, it is still displaying the nature of the disturbance in the by analogy with ‘photograph’, had
object beam. What is more, you can record this information if you replace the already been pre-empted by the
screen with a photographic film, and, when this has received a sufficient exposure, literary fraternity to mean a document
remove and process it. You now have a record that contains all the information in an author’s handwriting – which was
about the object wavefront. You have a hologram. a pity, as the term ‘autograph’ means
the same thing. On the other hand, a
If you can’t lay your hands on a Fresnel biprism, or, failing that, a 38 wedge prism photogram is a photographic image
(see Fig. 1.7a), you can carry out the same experiment by positioning a large sheet made without a lens, so perhaps the
of glass in the beam at a very shallow angle, deflecting one half of the beam across analogy isn’t altogether lost.
the other half (Fig. 1.7b). The system is known as Lloyd’s mirror, and this Incidentally, it was G L Rogers who
configuration is a replica on a small scale of what you experienced with your car subsequently coined the term
radio (cf. Fig. 1.4). You were, in fact, driving through a huge interference pattern. ‘holography’.

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 Practical Holography
There is also a third emergent beam,
which I am leaving discussion of until
later.
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Figure 1.6 Fringes formed using the configuration of Fig. 1.5. (a) Both beams undisturbed; (b) the changes in
pattern when a sewing needle is placed obliquely in one of the beams; (c) the pattern when a glass animal is
placed in one of the beams.
You have now recorded the information carried by the object wavefront, frozen
into the holographic fringe pattern, but can you retrieve it? The answer is yes, and
the method is surprisingly simple. You simply develop the exposed film like a
photographic negative, and then place it back in its original position, illuminated
by the reference beam alone. Both of the original beams will emerge.
So the reconstruction (or replay) beam re-creates the original object beam, which
continues out of the hologram as the image beam. An observer looking along it
will see what appears to be the object itself, and with full parallax: a shift in
viewpoint causes the eye to intercept a different part of the image wavefront. The
upper part of the hologram records the view of the upper part of the object, the
right hand side of the hologram the right side of the object, and so on. It is like
looking through a window at the object itself; and if you reduce the size of the
Figure 1.7 Two alternatives to a Fresnel biprism: (a) a single 38 prism; (b) Lloyd’s mirror. The geometry is the
same as that of multi-path distortion of a radio signal (Fig. 1.4).
 What is a hologram?

window (for example, by breaking the hologram into small pieces and looking Since the aperture of the hologram is
through a single piece) you don’t destroy the image, but merely restrict the range reduced, the resolution is somewhat
of viewpoints. reduced too, just as with a camera
lens.
Now, although the fringe pattern obtained in the biprism experiment is a genuine
hologram, it’s not a very interesting one, as there is very little parallax, and the
direct beam is very close to the image. Increasing the angle between the reference
and object beams moves the direct beam well out of the way of the image beam.
You can then also use more interesting subject matter. It needn’t be transparent, for
one thing; you can reflect the object beam off opaque subject matter, and by placing
the film close to the object you can record a hologram with a wider parallax angle.
But before we go any further, we need to look at what goes on when we replay a
hologram. How does this set of irregular fringes turn one beam into more than one
when it passes through them? The optical phenomenon concerned is called
diffraction, and it plays a key role in the reconstruction of the image.

Diffraction
You will be familiar already with some of the manifestations of diffraction. The A cosine grating is a one-dimensional
iridescent colours of butterfly wings, the flashing hues reflected from the surface of grating with a transmittance profile
a CD or DVD recording, the tail of a peacock, the rainbow hues of metalized gift that varies cosinusoidally with
wrapping papers, all these produce their colors by diffraction. When light waves distance. It is also called a sinusoidal
grating (cosine and sine functions
(or, for that matter, any waves) pass through a narrow grating, they spread out in
have the same shape, as explained in
well-defined directions. The simplest possible form of grating is called a cosine
the margin note on p. 25).
grating, and if you pass a beam of laser light through it, three beams emerge.
One is a continuation of the original beam; the other two, symmetrical on either
side, emerge at an angle that depends on the wavelength of the light and the
number of light/dark cycles per millimetre, usually called the spatial frequency. The
spacing, or pitch, of the grating is the reciprocal of the spatial frequency, called the
spatial period (Fig. 1.8).
A photographic record of the fringes produced by the biprism in the absence of The spectrum produced by a
any disturbing object is in fact a cosine grating, and if it is illuminated by a laser diffraction grating is in the opposite
beam it behaves in precisely the manner described. (If the light is reflected from the sense to that produced by a prism, in
surface of the grating the result is also the same.) Surfaces that show iridescent which blue is deviated more than red.

Figure 1.8 (a) A cosine grating. The spatial frequency is 1/spatial period (d ). (b) When a laser beam passes
through a cosine grating, three beams emerge.

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 Practical Holography
The optical transfer function (OTF) is a
graphical representation, for a given
lens system, of the contrast of the
optical image of a cosine grating
relative to that of the original, plotted
against spatial frequency (the
modulation transfer function), and the
relative shift of the image from
geometrical correctness (the phase
transfer function). The OTF thus
predicts the imaging performance of a
lens system with great precision.
12
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Box 1.2 The Fourier model for diffraction
If two cosine gratings of different spatial frequencies are superimposed, each will
produce its own independent pair of spots, the spacing of the spots being directly
proportional to the spatial frequency of the grating. Most diffraction gratings for
teaching or research purposes are replicas of gratings that have had opaque lines
ruled mechanically: these are called ‘square gratings’ (more correctly, rectangular),
from their transmittance profile. A square grating illuminated by a laser beam
produces a row of spots on a screen, spaced at regular intervals (Fig. 1.9).
Figure 1.9 (a) A square grating. (b) When a laser beam passes through a square grating, a whole series
of beams emerges.
The technique of Fourier analysis, a mathematical procedure developed by Joseph
Fourier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, shows (among other things)
that a square grating is identical with the sum of (i.e., the superposition of) a series
of cosine gratings having equal increments of spatial frequency (e.g. 10, 30, 50, 70,
etc. cycles per millimetre), and corresponding amplitudes decreasing in the series 1,
1/3, 1/5, 1/7, etc. In fact, any regular grating in one, two or even three dimensions
can be constructed from a Fourier series of cosine gratings of differing spatial
frequency, amplitude and orientation. Moreover, the grating doesn’t even have to
be a regularly repeated figure, but can have literally any profile: it can still be
described as a spectrum of spatial frequencies. Fourier developed a mathematical
technique, now known as Fourier transformation, to perform the operation.
Although he evolved the model in connection with thermodynamics, its main
application in the first half of the twentieth century was in communications
technology. In the 1950s it became clear that the Fourier model could also be
applied to the quantitative evaluation of optical images. The Fourier-based
concept of the optical transfer function led to a revolution in the understanding of
the imaging performance of lenses, and eventually to new insights into lens design.
The advent of the laser in the 1960s made it possible to demonstrate that a lens
actually produces in its rear focal plane an optical Fourier transform of an object
positioned in its front focal plane, thus confirming the validity of Fourier optics.
You will find a fuller treatment of the Fourier model for imaging in Appendix 2.
 What is a hologram?

Figure 1.10 The diffraction pattern produced when a laser beam passes through a single slit (a top hat
function).

colors do so because they have regular microscopic patterns of scales or grooves.

The reason for the different colors is that the angle of diffraction depends on
wavelength: blue light has a shorter wavelength than green light and is diffracted
less than green light, which in turn is diffracted less than red light. Thus white
light, which contains all visible wavelengths, is dispersed (spread out) into the
colors of the spectrum by the pattern of scales. However, as light from a laser has
only a single wavelength, diffraction of a laser beam by a cosine grating produces
only three narrow beams of light (Plate 1).
In the experiment with the biprism, one of the beams was disturbed by a straight
wire. What happened to the interference pattern? Well, the disturbing object was a
single opaque bar; an object that mathematicians call (from its transmittance
profile) a top hat function. This function has a readily calculable spatial frequency
content (see Box 1.2), and produces a well-described diffraction pattern of its own
(Fig. 1.10), which displays both the amplitude and the phase of the wavefronts in
the beam. This shows up in the interference pattern of Fig. 1.6b as kinks and
variations in brightness.
It can be shown mathematically that if the disturbed and undisturbed waves are
combined, and the result recorded on film, the interference pattern on the film will
diffract a laser beam so as to produce a continuation of the same disturbed
waveform, propagated onwards from the recorded pattern; and so it proves in
practice. This applies to both transmitted and reflected beams: the beam diffracted
away from the hologram replicates the original object beam. For the more
mathematically minded reader there is a proof of this in Appendix 1.
So far we have been considering the behavior of light when the distance between
the object and the hologram is large enough for the various diffracted components
of the object beam to have sorted themselves out. This type of ‘far-field’ diffraction
is called Fraunhöfer diffraction, and is not difficult to analyze by Fourier methods.
In general, however, when we make a hologram we have the recording material
close to the subject matter, and the diffracted wavefronts are all mixed together.
This is known as Fresnel diffraction (it was Fresnel who first described this
situation). In a Fresnel hologram the diffraction information is not localized, but is
distributed over the whole emulsion surface.

Amplitude and phase gratings

There is just one more item. In the mathematical analysis in Appendix 1, the
assumption is that the transmittance of the hologram codes the object information.
Now, it is an unfortunate fact that if your exposure lies within the linear region of
the transmittance/exposure response curve of the emulsion, and you process it

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 Practical Holography

The refractive index of a material is
the speed of light in the material
divided into the speed of light in
empty space. For plate glass and most
plastics it is around 1.5. It is higher
for shorter wavelengths, and this
accounts for the dispersion of white
light by a prism, as deviation is
approximately proportional to
refractive index.
conventionally (i.e., develop and fix), less than 3 per cent of the replay beam will
actually go to make up the image beam. However, if the grating that forms the
hologram consists of variations in refractive index rather than transmittance, it is
possible to make all of each fringe contribute to the diffracted beam.
By converting all the developed silver back into silver bromide (which has a higher
refractive index than gelatin, the main constituent of the emulsion), we can raise
the diffraction efficiency considerably. Methods of doing this are described in later
chapters.

The diffraction efficiency of a

hologram is the intensity ratio of
image-forming light to incident light,
expressed as a percentage.
Box 1.3 The information in a hologram
The Fourier model tells us that all the information about the subject matter of a
hologram is coded in its diffraction field. By looking at its far-field pattern you can
obtain the following information about an object:
. The spatial frequencies of the cosine-grating components present, from the
distances of the pairs of spots from the center of the pattern.
. The relative amplitude transmittances or reflectances of the components, from
the brightnesses of their spots.
. Their orientation, from the orientation of the pairs of spots.

The phase of the beam tells us how

much farther the object wavefront (at Figure 1.11 If the function (a) is squared, the function (b) results. It is entirely positive; you can’t now be
sure whether the original function was like (a) or (c), or, indeed, one of many other functions.
a particular point) has traveled than
the corresponding reference
wavefront at that point. This is the
But there is no way of telling where the dark and light bars of the gratings are (i.e.,
depth information that is lost in a
their spatial phase), as this depends on the relative phases of the components of
photograph.
the diffracted wavefront. Phase information disappears when a diffraction pattern

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 What is a hologram?

is recorded, for one simple but frustrating reason: every light detector, whether
photochemical, photoelectronic or biological, records only the time-averaged
intensity of the field. This is proportional to the square of the amplitude, and is
therefore always positive. When you take the square root to get back to the
amplitude you have no way of knowing whether the answer is positive or negative
(Fig. 1.11). The presence of a reference beam, however, preserves this
information, as it gives us something we can measure the phase of the object
wavefront against. The phase of the object beam relative to that of the reference
beam is encoded in the displacement of the fringes.
So a hologram is, indeed, a total record of the wavefront diffracted by the subject
matter; and, as we have seen, its illumination by a replica of the reference beam
reconstructs the object wavefront.

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