Holographic imaging with a white light source: a novel technique

Abstract

We illustrate a technique of white light holographic imaging where the subject wave undergoes small displacement during the recording of the hologram. If a suitable recording geometry is followed, this results in concentrating in a certain plane during reconstruction all the light diffracted by the hologram into a distribution resembling a horizontal slit. The hologram behaves like a rainbow hologram if it is set to disperse the incident white light along the direction of the subject displacement. Two methods based upon a continuous and discrete multiple displacement of the subject, respectively, along with the appropriate apodization techniques to reshape the modulation of the subject wave are described. The loss of resolution in the reconstructed image due to smearing caused by the subject displacement has been found to be far less important compared to that given by more dominating effect such as wavelength spread. The technique has been extended for application to the multicolor holography. The theory and some experimental results are presented.