Abstract

The holograms considered are formed from opaque or transparent diffracting objects which are contained in an aperture illuminated with a coherent, collimated, quasimonochromatic beam of light. It has been shown that the intensity distribution in the near-field of the aperture, but in the far-field of the individual objects which are contained in the aperture, is given by a function whose essential term represents the interference between the Fraunhofer diffraction pattern from the object and the coherent background. The hologram thus formed is referred to as a Fraunhofer or far-field hologram because of the imposed condition. The reconstruction, which is accomplished by placing the recorded hologram in another coherent collimated quasimonochromatic beam and again going to the far-field of the individual objects, yields an intensity which is essentially the original object distribution. In the far-field region of the individual objects for which this result is valid, the reconstruction is seen to be devoid of the evidence of a virtual image. One advantage of this particular method is that the virtual image which appears in the conventional (Fresnel) hologram method creates no problem here since it reduces to a constant for the far-field approximation.

© 1966 Optical Society of America

Image Reconstruction from a Fraunhofer X-Ray Hologram with Visible Light*

John W. Giles
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 59(9) 1179-1188 (1969)

Reconstructed images from volume holograms in the Fraunhofer approximation: Analysis by a new spherical-wave expansion

Yasuo Shono
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 66(6) 564-574 (1976)

Fresnel-Transform Representation of Holograms and Hologram Classification*

John T. Winthrop and C. R. Worthington
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 56(10) 1362-1368 (1966)

Influence of Photographic Film on Wavefront Reconstruction. I. Plane Wavefronts*

Raoul F. vanLigten
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 56(1) 1-9 (1966)

Interference Microscope with Total Wavefront Reconstruction

D. Gabor and W. P. Goss
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 56(7) 849-858 (1966)