5 - Principles of Coherent Holography

Summary

In photography, the intensity of a 3-D object is imaged and recorded in a 2-D recording medium such as a photographic film or a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, which responds only to light intensity. Since there is no interference during recording, the phase information of the wave field is not preserved. The loss of the phase information of the light field from the object destroys the 3-D characteristics of the recorded scene, and therefore parallax and depth information of the 3-D object cannot be observed by viewing a photograph. Holography is a technique in which the amplitude and phase information of the light field of the object are recorded through interference. The phase is coded in the interference pattern. The recorded interference pattern is a hologram. It is reminiscent of Young’s interference experiment in which the position of the interference fringes depends on the phase difference between the two sources. Once the hologram of a 3-D object has been recorded, we can reconstruct the 3-D image of the object by simply illuminating the hologram or through digital reconstruction. We record the complex amplitude of the 3-D object in coherent holography, whereas in incoherent holography, we record the intensity distribution of the 3-D object. In this chapter, we discuss the principles of coherent holography.