PHYSICS

INVESTIGATORY
PROJECT
OPTICS: HOLOGRAM

Vedant Dobwal 5/1/23 HOLOGRAM

Introduction
Holography is a technique that enables a Wavefront to be
recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is the best
known as a method of generating real three-dimensional
images but it also has a wide range of other applications. In
principle, it is possible to make a hologram for any type of
Wave.

A Hologram is made by superimposing a second wavefront

(normally called the reference beam) on the wavefront of
interest, thereby generating an interference pattern which is
recorded on a physical medium.

When only the second wavefront illuminates the interference

pattern, it is diffracted to recreate the original wavefront.

Holograms can also be computer-generated by modelling

the two wavefronts and adding them together digitally.
The resulting digital image is then printed onto a suitable mask
or film and illuminated by a suitable source to reconstruct the
wavefront of interest.
History
The Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor (in Hungarian:
Gábor Dénes) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971
"for his invention and development of the holographic
method".

His work, done in the late 1940s, was built on pioneering work
in the field of X-ray microscopy by other scientists including
Mieczysław Wolfke in 1920 and William Lawrence Bragg in
1939.

This discovery was an unexpected result of research into

improving electron microscopes at the British Thomson-
Houston Company (BTH) in Rugby, England, and the company
filed a patent in December 1947 (patent GB685286).

The technique as originally invented is still used in electron

microscopy, where it is known as electron holography, but
optical holography did not really advance until the
development of the laser in 1960. The word holography
comes from the Greek words ὅλος (holos; "whole") and
γραφή (graphē; "writing" or "drawing").
What is Hologram?
A hologram is a recording of an interference pattern which can
reproduce a 3D light field using diffraction. The reproduced
light field can generate an image which still has the depth,
parallax, and other properties of the original scene.

A hologram is a photographic recording of a light field,

rather than an image formed by a lens. The holographic
medium, for example the object produced by a holographic
process (which may be referred to as a hologram) is usually
unintelligible when viewed under diffuse ambient light. It is
an encoding of the light field as an interference pattern of
variations in the opacity, density, or surface profile of the
photographic medium. When suitably lit, the interference
pattern diffracts the light into an accurate reproduction of the
original light field, and the objects that were in it exhibit visual
depth cues such as parallax and perspective that change
realistically with the different angles of viewing. That is, the
view of the image from different angles represents the subject
viewed from similar angles. In this sense, holograms do not
have just the illusion of depth but are truly three-dimensional
images.
Basics of Holography
Holography is a technique that enables a light field (which is
generally the result of a light source scattered off objects) to
be recorded and later reconstructed when the original light field
is no longer present, due to the absence of the original objects.

Holography can be thought of as somewhat similar to sound

recording, whereby a sound field created by vibrating matter
like musical instruments or vocal cords, is encoded in such
a way that it can be reproduced later, without the presence of
the original vibrating matter.

However, it is even more similar to Ambisonic sound

recording in which any listening angle of a sound field can be
reproduced in the reproduction.
Laser Application
In laser holography, the hologram is recorded using a source of
laser light, which is very pure in its colour and orderly in its
composition. Various setups may be used, and several types of
holograms can be made, but all involve the interaction of light
coming from different directions and producing a microscopic
interference pattern which a plate, film, or other medium
photographically records.

In one common arrangement, the laser beam is split into two,

one known as the object beam and the other as the reference
beam. The object beam is expanded by passing it through a
lens and used to illuminate the subject. The recording
medium is located where this light, after being reflected or
scattered by the subject, will strike it. The edges of the
medium will ultimately serve as a window through which the
subject is seen, so its location is chosen with that in mind. The
reference beam is
expanded and
made to shine
directly on the
medium, where it
interacts with the
light coming from
the subject to
create the desired
interference
pattern.
Applications: Art
Early on, artists saw the potential of holography as a medium
and gained access to science laboratories to create their work.
Holographic art is often the result of collaborations between
scientists and artists, although some holographers would
regard themselves as both an artist and a scientist.

Salvador Dalí claimed to have been the first to employ

holography artistically. He was certainly the first and best-
known surrealist to do so, but the 1972 New York exhibit of
Dalí holograms had been preceded by the holographic art
exhibition that was held at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in
Michigan in 1968 and by the one at the Finch College gallery in
New York in 1970, which attracted national media attention.

During the 1980s, many artists who worked with holography

helped the diffusion of this so-called "new medium" in the art
world, such as Harriet Casdin-Silver of the United States, Dieter
Jung of Germany, and Moysés Baumstein of Brazil, each one
searching for a proper "language" to use with the three-
dimensional work, avoiding the simple holographic reproduction
of a sculpture or object. For instance, in Brazil, many concrete
poets (Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Julio Plaza and
José Wagner Garcia, associated with Moysés Baumstein) found
in holography a way to express themselves and to renew
Concrete Poetry.
The MIT Museum and Jonathan Ross both have extensive
collections of holography and on-line catalogues of art
holograms.
Physics of Holography
POINT SOURCES:

If the recording medium is illuminated with a point source and

a normally incident plane wave, the resulting pattern is a
sinusoidal zone plate, which acts as a negative Fresnel lens
whose focal length is equal to the separation of the point
source and the recording plane.

When a plane wave-front illuminates a negative lens, it is

expanded into a wave that appears to diverge from the focal
point of the lens. Thus, when the recorded pattern is
illuminated with the original plane wave, some of the light is
diffracted into a diverging beam equivalent to the original
spherical wave; a holographic recording of the point source
has been created.

When the plane wave is incident at a non-normal angle at the

time of recording, the pattern formed is more complex, but still
acts as a negative lens if it is illuminated at the original angle.

sinusoidal zone plate

PLANE WAVEFRONTS:
A diffraction grating is a structure with a repeating pattern. A
simple example is a metal plate with slits cut at regular
intervals. A light wave that is incident on a grating is split into
several waves; the direction of these diffracted waves is
determined by the grating spacing and the wavelength of the
light.

A simple hologram can be made by superimposing two plane

waves from the same light source on a holographic recording
medium. The two waves interfere, giving a straight-line fringe
pattern whose intensity varies sinusoidally across the medium.
The spacing of the fringe pattern is determined by the angle
between the two waves, and by the wavelength of the light.

The recorded light pattern is a diffraction grating. When it is

illuminated by only one of the waves used to create it, it can be
shown that one of the diffracted waves emerges at the same
angle at which the second wave was originally incident, so that
the second wave has been 'reconstructed'. Thus, the recorded
light pattern is a holographic recording as defined above.

COMPLEX OBJECTS:
To record a hologram of a complex object, a laser beam is first
split into two beams of light. One beam illuminates the object,
which then scatters light onto the recording medium. According
to diffraction theory, each point in the object acts as a point
source of light so the recording medium can be considered to
be illuminated by a set of point sources located at varying
distances from the medium.

The second (reference) beam illuminates the recording medium

directly. Each point source wave interferes with the reference
beam, giving rise to its own sinusoidal zone plate in the
recording medium. The resulting pattern is the sum of all these
'zone plates', which combine to produce a random (speckle)
pattern as in the photograph above.

When the hologram is illuminated by the original reference

beam, each of the individual zone plates reconstructs the
object wave that produced it, and these individual wavefronts
are combined to reconstruct the whole of the object beam. The
viewer perceives a wavefront that is identical with the
wavefront scattered from the object onto the recording
medium, so that it appears that the object is still in place even
if it has been removed.