A brief history of the development of holography

D. Gabor, a British physicist born in Hungary in 1947, was engaged in the work of improving the resolution ability of electron microscopes. He was inspired by W. Bragg's work in X-ray metallurgy and F. Zernike's work on the introduction of coherence. Inspired by the work on phase display in the background, he proposed the idea of ??holography with the intention of improving the resolving power of electron microscopes. The method is to completely ignore the electron microscope objective lens and use film to record the unfocused electron waves diffracted by the object to obtain a hologram. Illuminating a hologram with coherent visible light, the diffracted waves will produce a magnified optical image of the original object. In 1948, he used the visible light emitted by a mercury lamp instead of electron waves to obtain the first hologram and its reproduced image. For the invention of holography, Gabor won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. In the 1950s, scientists such as G. Rogers further enriched the wavefront reproduction theory.

The phase information of the light wave is recorded by interfering with the reference light wave to form an interference pattern on the recording medium, so the two beams of light are required to be highly coherent. In 1960, the emergence of laser opened the way for the development of holography. Laser is a strong monochromatic light, which is the ideal light source for making holograms. Laser illuminates the hologram to see a clear three-dimensional image. From 1961 to 1962, E. Leith and others improved the Gabor hologram, introduced the "oblique reference beam method" to solve the "twin image" problem in one fell swoop, and successfully photographed the first practical laser image with a helium-neon laser. Hologram. This made holography one of the most active branches in the field of optics after 1963. In 1964, Leith and others proposed the concept of diffusion hologram and obtained the reproduction of three-dimensional objects. At the same time, Soviet physicists proposed the concept of reflection holograms based on Lippmann color photography and Gabor holography. Since 1965, pulse holography, an important branch of holography, has been developed, which has enabled the practical application of dynamic holographic interferometry. In 1968, S. Benton invented rainbow holography. Because white light can be used to observe holograms and see the rainbow image of recorded objects, it became an important development in display holography. It made possible the subsequent mass production of holograms through molding technology.