Holography

The inventorThe inventor

Holography was discovered by Dennis Gabor, who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971.

He studied at the Technical University in Berlin. Having fled from Nazi Germany in 1933, Gabor was invited to Britain to work in the development department of British Thomson-Houston company in Rugby, Warwickshire. During his time in Rugby, he met Marjorie Butler, and they married in 1936. It was while working at British Thomson-Houston that he invented holography in 1947. At the time Gabor developed holography, coherent light sources were not available, so the theory had to wait more than a decade until its first practical applications were realized, though he experimented with a heavily filtered mercury arc light source. The invention in 1960 of the laser, the first coherent light source, was followed by the first hologram, in 1964, after which holography became commercially available.

Theory

In holography, some of the light scattered from an object or a set of objects falls on the recording medium. A second light beam, known as the reference beam, also illuminates the recording medium, so that interference occurs between the two beams. The resulting light field is an apparently random pattern of varying intensity which is the hologram. It can be shown that if the hologram is illuminated by the original reference beam, a light field is diffracted by the reference beam which is identical to the light field which was scattered by the object or objects. Thus, someone looking into the hologram "sees" the objects even though it may no longer be present. There are a variety of recording materials which can be used, including photographic film.

Pictures

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