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Holograms have other surprising traits as well. If you cut one in half, each half contains whole views of the entire holographic image. The same is true if you cut out a small piece - - even a tiny fragment will still contain the whole picture. On top of that, if you make a hologram of a magnifying glass, the holographic version will magnify the other objects in the hologram, just like a real one. Once you know the principles behind holograms, understanding how they can do all this is easy. This article will explain how a hologram, light and your brain work together make clear, 3-D images. All of a hologram's properties come directly from the process used to create it, so we'll start with an overview of what it takes to make one.
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SPECIAL THANKS
of Physics at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, for his assistance with this article.
Launch Video
Making a Hologram
It doesn't take very many tools to make a hologram. You can make one with: A laser: Red lasers, usually helium-neon (HeNe) lasers, are common in holography. Some home holography experiments rely on the diodes from red laser pointers, but the light from a laser pointer tends to be less coherent and less stable, which can make it hard to get
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that holographic film has to be able to record very small changes in light that take place over microscopic distances. In other words, it needs to have a very fine grain. In some cases, holograms that use a red laser rely on emulsions that respond most strongly to red light. There are lots of different ways to arrange these tools -- we'll stick to a basic transmission hologram setup for now. 1. The laser points at the beam splitter, which divides the beam of light into two parts. 2. Mirrors direct the paths of these two beams so that they hit their intended targets.
3. Each of the two beams passes through a diverging lens and becomes a wide swath of light rather than a narrow beam. 4. One beam, the object beam, reflects off of the object and onto the photographic emulsion. 5. The other beam, the reference beam, hits the emulsion without reflecting off of anything other than a mirror. In the next section we'll look at workspace requirements.
TRANSMISSION AND REFLECTION
There are two basic categories of holograms -- transmission and reflection. Transmission holograms create a 3-D image when monochromatic light, or light that is all one wavelength, travels through them. Reflection holograms create a 3-D image when laser light or white light reflects off of their surface. For the sake of simplicity, this article discusses transmission holograms viewed with the help of a laser except where noted.
Workspace Requirements
Getting a good image requires a suitable work space. In some ways, the requirements for this space are more stringent than the requirements for your equipment. The darker the room is, the better. A good option for adding a little light to the room without affecting the finished hologram is a safelight, like the ones used in darkrooms. Since darkroom safelights are often red and holography often uses red light, there are green and blue-green safelights made specifically for holography. Holography also requires a working surface that can keep the equipment absolutely still -- it can't vibrate when you walk across the room or when cars drive by outside. Holography labs and professional studios often use specially designed tables that have honeycomb-shaped
You can create your ow n holography table using inner tubes and sand to dam pen vibration.
support layers resting on pneumatic legs. These are under the table's top surface, and they dampen vibration. You can make your own holography table by placing inflated inner tubes on a low table, then placing a box full of a thick layer of sand on top of it. The sand and the inner tubes will play the role of the professional table's honeycombs and pneumatic supports. If you don't have enough space for such a large table, you can improvise using cups of sand or sugar to hold each piece of equipment, but these won't be as steady as a larger setup. To make clear holograms, you need to reduce vibration in the air as well. Heating and air conditioning systems can blow the air around, and so can the movement of your body, your breath and even the dissipation of your body heat. For these reasons, you'll need to turn the heating and cooling system off and wait for a few minutes after setting up your equipment to make the hologram.
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These precautions sound a little like photography advice taken to the extreme -- when you take pictures with a camera, you have to keep your lens clean, control light levels and hold the camera absolutely still. This is because making a hologram is a lot like taking a picture with a microscopic level of detail. We'll look at how holograms are like photographs in the next section.
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In photography, light passes through a lens and a shutter before hitting a piece of film or a light-sensitive sensor.
1. A shutter opens or moves out of the path of a laser. (In some setups, a pulsed laser fires a single pulse of light, eliminating the need for a shutter.) 2. The light from the object beam reflects off of an object. The light from the reference beam bypasses the object entirely. 3. The light from both beams comes into contact with the photographic emulsion, where lightsensitive compounds react to it. 4. The shutter closes, blocking the light. Just like with a photograph, the result of this process is a piece of film that has recorded the incoming light. However, when you develop the holographic plate and look at it, what you see is a little unusual. Developed film from a camera shows you a negative view of the original scene -- areas that were light are dark, and vice versa. When you look at the negative, you can still get a sense of what the original scene looked like. But when you look at a developed piece of film used to make a hologram, you don't see anything that looks like the original scene. Instead, you might see a dark frame of film or a random pattern of lines and swirls. Turning this frame of film into an image requires the right illumination. In a transmission hologram, monochromatic light shines through the hologram to make an image. In a reflection hologram, monochromatic or white light reflects off of the surface of the hologram to make an image. Your eyes and brain interpret the light shining through or reflecting off of the hologram as a representation of a three-dimensional object. The holograms you see on credit cards and stickers are reflection holograms. You need the right light source to see a hologram because it records the light's phase and amplitude like a code. Rather than recording a simple pattern of reflected light from a scene, it records the interference between the reference beam and the object beam. It does this as a pattern of tiny interference fringes. Each fringe can be smaller than one wavelength of the light used to create them. Decoding these interference fringes requires a key -- that key is the right kind of light. Next, we'll explore exactly how light makes interference fringes.
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In holography, light passes through a shutter and lenses before striking a light-sensitive piece of holographic film .
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The wavelength of light is the distance from one peak of the wave to the next. This relates to the wave's frequency, or the number of waves that pass a point in a given period of time. The frequency of light determines its color and is measured in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz). Colors at the red end of the spectrum have lower frequencies, while colors at the violet end of the spectrum have higher frequencies. Light's amplitude, or the height of the waves, corresponds to its intensity. White light, like sunlight, contains all of the different frequencies of light traveling in all directions, including ones that are beyond the visible spectrum. Although this light allows you to see everything around you, it's relatively chaotic. It contains lots of different wavelengths traveling in lots of different directions. Even waves of the same wavelength can be in a different phase, or alignment between the peaks and troughs. Laser light, on the other hand, is orderly. Lasers produce monochromatic light -- it has one wavelength and one color. The light that emerges from a laser is also coherent. All of the peaks and troughs of the waves are lined up, or in phase. The waves line up spatially, or across the wave of the beam, as well as temporally, or along the length of the beam. You can check out How Lasers Work to see precisely how a laser does this.
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Light Reflection
You can make and view a photograph using unorganized white light, but to make a hologram, you need the organized light of a laser. This is because photographs record only the amplitude of the light that hits the film, while holograms record differences in both amplitude and the phase. In order for the film to record these differences, the light has to start out with one wavelength and one phase across the entire beam. All the waves have to be identical when they leave the laser. Here's what happens when you turn on a laser to expose a holographic plate:
When light w aves reflect, they follow the law of reflection. The angle at w hich they strike the surface is the sam e as the angle at w hich they leave it.
1. A column of light leaves the laser and passes through the beam splitter. 2. The two columns reflect off of their respective mirrors and pass through their respective diverging lenses. 3. The object reflects off of the object and combines with the reference beam at the holographic film. There are a couple of things to keep in mind about the object beam. One is that the object is not 100 percent reflective -- it absorbs some of the laser light that reaches it, changing the intensity of the object wave. The darker portions of the object absorb more light, and the lighter portions absorb less light. On top of that, the surface of the object is rough on a microscopic level, even if it looks smooth to the human eye, so it causes a diffuse reflection. It scatters light in every direction following the law of reflection. In other words, the angle of incidence, or the angle at which the light hits the surface, is the same as its angle of reflection, or the light at which it leaves the surface. This diffuse reflection causes light reflected from every part of the object to reach every part of the holographic plate. This is why a hologram is redundant -- each portion of the plate holds information about each portion of the object.
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The holographic plate captures the interaction between the object and reference beams. We'll look at how this happens next.
REDUNDANCY
If you tore a hologram of a mask in half, you could still see the whole mask in each half. But by removing half of the hologram, you also remove half of the information required to recreate the scene. For this reason, the resolution of the image you see in half a hologram isnt as good. In addition, the holographic plate doesnt get information about areas that are out of its line of sight, or physically blocked by the surface of the object.
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The light that reaches the holographic emulsion is just like the waves in the aquarium. It has peaks and troughs, and some of the waves are taller while others are shorter. The silver halide in the emulsion responds to these light waves just like it responds to light waves in an ordinary photograph. When you develop the emulsion, parts of the emulsion that receive more intense light get darker, while those that receive less intense light stay a little lighter. These darker and lighter areas become the interference fringes. In the next section we'll look at the emulsion bleaching process.
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You can visualize the interaction of light w aves[/b] [b]by im agining w aves on w ater.
HOLOGRAPHIC MAGNIFYING GLASS If you make a hologram of a scene that includes a magnifying glass, the light from the object beam passes through the glass on its way to the emulsion. The magnifying glass spreads out the laser light, just like it would with ordinary light. This spread-out light is what forms part of the interference pattern on the emulsion. You can also use the holographic process to magnify images by positioning the object farther from the holographic plate. The light waves reflected off of the object can spread out farther before they reach the plate. You can magnify a displayed hologram by using a laser with a longer wavelength to illuminate it. RELATED ARTICLES How Light Works How Cameras Work How Kaleidoscopes Work How Holographic Memory Will Work How 3-D Glasses Work
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In a transm ission hologram , the light illum inating the hologram com es from the side opposite the observer.
aquarium, waves will spread toward the panel in concentric rings. Only a little piece of each ring will make it through each gap in the panel. Each of those little pieces will go on spreading on the other side. This process is a direct result of the light traveling as a wave -- when a wave moves past an obstacle or through a slit, its wave front expands on the other side. There are so many slits among the interference fringes of a hologram that it acts like a diffraction grating, causing lots of intersecting wave fronts to appear in a very small space.
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The interference fringes in a hologram cause light to scatter in all directions, creating an im age in the process. The fringes diffract and reflect som e of the light (inset), and som e of the light passes through unchanged.
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HOLOGRAPHY AND MATHEMATICS You can describe all of the interactions between the object and reference beams, as well as the shapes of the interference fringes, using mathematical equations. This makes it possible to program a computer to print a pattern onto a holographic plate, creating a hologram of an object that doesnt actually exist. RELATED ARTICLES
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object was on the other side of the holographic plate, the beam travels toward you. Your eyes focus this light, and your brain interprets it as a three-dimensional image located behind the transparent hologram. This may sound far-fetched, but you encounter this phenomenon every day. Every time you look in a mirror, you see yourself and the surroundings behind you as though they were on the other side of the mirror's surface. But the light rays that make this image aren't on the other side of the mirror -- they're the ones that bounce off of the mirror's surface and reach your eyes. Most holograms also act like color filters, so you see the object as the same color as the laser used in its creation rather than its natural color.
This virtual image comes from the light that hits the interference fringes and spreads out on the way to your eyes. However, light that hits the reverse side of each fringe does the opposite. Instead of moving upward and diverging, it moves downward and converges. It turns into a focused reproduction of the object -- a real image that you can see if you put a screen in its path. The real image is pseudoscopic, or flipped back to front -- it's the opposite of the virtual image that you can see without the aid of a screen. With the right illumination, holograms can display both images at the same time. However, in some cases, whether you see the real or the virtual image depends on what side of the hologram is facing you. Your brain plays a big role in your perception of both of these images. When your eyes detect the light from the virtual image, your brain interprets it as a beam of light reflected from a real object. Your brain uses multiple cues, including, shadows, the relative positions of different objects, distances and parallax , or differences in angles, to interpret this scene correctly. It uses these same cues to interpret the pseudoscopic real image. This description applies to transmission holograms made with silver halide emulsion. Next, we'll look at some other types of holograms.
discussed. There are lots of object and laser setups that can produce these types of holograms. A common one is an inline setup, with the laser, the emulsion and the object all in one line. The beam from the laser starts out as the reference beam. It passes through the emulsion, bounces off the object on the other side, and returns to the emulsion as the object beam, creating an interference pattern. You view this hologram when white or monochrome light reflects off of its surface. You're still seeing a virtual image -- your brain's interpretation of light waves that seem to be coming from a real object on the other side of the hologram. Reflection holograms are often thicker than transmission holograms. There is more physical space for recording interference fringes. This also means that there are more layers of reflective surfaces for the light to hit. You can think of holograms that are made this way as having multiple layers that are only about half a wavelength deep. When light enters the first layer, some of it reflects back toward the light source, and some continues to the next layer, where the process repeats. The light from each layer interferes with the light in the layers above it. This is known as the Bragg effect, and it's a necessary part of the reconstruction of the object beam in reflection holograms. In addition, holograms with a strong Bragg effect are known as thick holograms, while those with little Bragg effect are thin. The Bragg effect can also change the way the hologram reflects light, especially in holograms
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Multiple Images
In movies, holograms can appear to move and recreate entire animated scenes in midair, but today's holograms can only mimic movement. You can get the illusion of movement by exposing one holographic emulsion multiple times at different angles using objects in different positions. The hologram only creates each image when light strikes it from the right angle. When you view this hologram from different angles, your brain interprets the differences in the images as movement. It's like you're viewing a holographic flip book. You can also use a pulsed laser that fires for a minute fraction of a second to make still holograms of objects in motion.
The fam ous hologram "The Kiss" show s a sequence of sim ilar, stationary im ages. Your eye sees m any fram es sim ultaneously, and your brain interprets them as m oving im ages. Image 1996-2007 Holophile, Inc.
Multiple exposures of the same plate can lead to other effects as well. You can expose the plate from two angles using two completely different images, creating one hologram that displays different images depending on viewing angle. Exposing the same plate using the exact same scene and red, green and blue lasers can create a full-color hologram. This process is tricky, though, and it's not usually used for mass-produced holograms. You can also expose the same scene before and after the subject has experienced some kind of stimulus, like a gust of wind or a vibration. This lets researchers see exactly how the stimulus changed the object. Using lasers to make three-dimensional images of objects may sound like a novelty or a form of art. But holograms have an increasing number of practical uses. Scientists can use holograms to study objects in three dimensions, and they can use acoustical holography to
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create three-dimensional reconstructions of sound waves. Holographic memory has also become an increasingly common method of storing large amounts of data in a very small space. Some researchers even believe that the human brain stores information in a manner that is much like a hologram. Although holograms don't currently move like they do in the movies, researchers are studying ways to project fully 3-D holograms into visible air. In the future, you may be able to use holograms to do everything from watching TV to deciding which hair style will look best on you. To learn more about holograms, follow the links on the next page.
THE FIRST HOLOGRAM
Dennis Gabor invented holograms in 1947. He was attempting to find a method for improving the resolution of electron microscopes. However, lasers, which are necessary for creating and displaying good holograms, were not invented until 1960. Gabor used a mercury vapor lamp, which produced monochrome blue light, and filters make his light more coherent. Gabor won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention in 1971.
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How Vision Works More Great Links HoloWorld MIT Media Lab: Holographic Video Holographer.org Sources Encyclopedia Britannica. "Holography." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. (4/9/2007) Gargaro, Paul. "A New Dimension in Research." Michigan Engineering. (4/9/2007) http://www.engin.umich.edu/alumni/engineer/03FW/ research/holography/ Goodman, Joseph W., et. al. "Holography." AccessScience@McGraw-Hill. 5/13/2002. (4/9/2007) Graham, Marty. "Fake Holograms a 3-D Crime Wave." Wired. 2/7/2007. (4/9/2007) http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/02/72664# Hariharan, P. "Basics of Holography." Cambridge Press. 2002. Heckman, Philip. The Magic of Holography. Atheneum. 1986. Holophile. "Holography." (4/9/2007) http://www.holophile.com/html/about.htm Kasper, Joseph E. and Steven A. Feller. "The Complete Book of Holograms." John Wiley & Sons. 1987. Keats, Jonathan. "The Holographic Television." Popular Science. (4/9/2007) http://www.popsci.com/popsci/whatsnew/ 569f0e0796b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html Krakow, Gary. "How to Make Holograms at Home." MSNBC. 5/6/2005 (4/9/2007) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7759505/ Outwater, Christopher and Van Hamersveld. "Practical Holography." Dimensional Arts. (4/9/2007) http://www.holo.com/holo/book/book1.html University of Georgia. "Holography." HyperPhysics. (4/9/2007) Williams, Earl. "Acoustical Holography." AccessScience@McGraw-Hill. 5/8/2002. (4/9/2007)
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