Hologram

Introduction
How many holograms have you got in your pocket? If you're carrying any
money, the answer is probably "quite a few." Holograms are those shiny,
metallic patterns with ghostly images floating inside them that help to
defeat counterfeiters: they're very hard to reproduce so they help to stop
people printing illicit copies of banknotes. Credit cards usually have
holograms on them too and software packages also frequently have
hologrammatic seals to prove their authenticity. What else can you use
holograms for? Let's take a closer look at what they are and how they're
made!
What is a hologram?
Holograms are a bit like photographs that never die. They're sort of
"photographic ghosts": they look like three-dimensional photos that have
somehow got trapped inside glass, plastic, or metal. When you tilt a credit-
card hologram, you see an image of something like a bird moving "inside"
the card. How does it get there and what makes it seem to move? What
makes it different from an ordinary photograph?
Suppose you want to take a photograph of an apple. You hold a camera in
front of it and, when you press the shutter button to take your picture, the
camera lens opens briefly and let’s light through to hit the film (in an old-
fashioned camera) or the light-sensitive image sensor chip (the CCD or
CMOS chip in a digital camera). All the light traveling from the apple comes
from a single direction and enters a single lens, so the camera can record
only a two-dimensional pattern of light, dark, and colour.
If you look at an apple, something different happens. Light reflects off the
surface of the apple into your two eyes and your brain merges their two
pictures into a single stereoscopic (three-dimensional) image. If you move
your head slightly, the rays of light reflected off the apple have to travel
along slightly different paths to meet your eyes, and parts of the apple may
now look lighter or darker or a different colour. Your brain instantly
recalculates everything, and you see a slightly different picture. This is why
your eyes see a three-dimensional image.
A hologram is a cross between what happens when you take a photograph
and what happens when you look at something for real. Like a photograph,
a hologram is a permanent record of the light reflected off an object. But a
hologram also looks real and three-dimensional and moves as you look
around it, just like a real object. That happens because of the unique way in
which holograms are made.
What is the Physics?

Light is an amazing form of energy that zaps through our world at blistering
speeds: 300,000 km per second—enough to whip from the Sun to Earth in
just over 8 minutes. We see things because our eyes are sophisticated light
detectors: they constantly capture the light rays bouncing off nearby objects
so our brain can construct an ever-changing impression of the world
around us. The only trouble is that our brain can't keep a permanent record
of what our eyes see. We can recall what we thought we saw, and we can
recognize images we've seen in the past, but we can't easily recreate
images intact once they've disappeared from view.
Back in the 19th century, ingenious inventors helped to solve this problem
by discovering how to capture and store images on chemically treated
paper. Photography, as this became known, has revolutionized the way
people see and engage with the world—and it gave us fantastic forms of
entertainment in the 20th century in the form of movies and TV. But no
matter how realistic or artistic a photograph appears, there's no question of
it being real. We look at a photo and instantly see that the image is dead
history: the light that captured the objects in a photograph vanished long
ago and can never be recaptured.
Laser light is much purer than the ordinary light in a flashlight (torch) beam.
In a flashlight beam, all the light waves are random and jumbled up. Light in
a flashlight beam runs along any old how, like schoolchildren racing down a
corridor when the bell goes for home time. But in a laser, the light waves
are coherent: they all travel precisely in step, like soldiers marching on
parade.
When a laser beam is split up to make a hologram, the light waves in the
two parts of the beam are traveling in identical ways. When they recombine
in the photographic plate, the object beam has travelled via a slightly
different path and its light rays have been disturbed by reflecting off the
outer surface of the object. Since the beams were originally joined together
and perfectly in step, recombining the beams shows how the light rays in
the object beam have been changed compared to the reference beam. In
other words, by joining the two beams back together and comparing them,
you can see how the object changes light rays falling onto it—and that's
simply another way of saying "what the object looks like." This information
is burned permanently into the photographic plate by the laser beams. So,
a hologram is effectively a permanent record of what something looks like
seen from any angle.
Now this is the clever part. Every point in a hologram catches light waves
that travel from every point in the object. That means wherever you look at
a hologram you see exactly how light would have arrived at that point if
you'd been looking at the real object. So, as you move your head around,
the holographic image appears to change just as the image of a real object
changes. And that's why holograms appear to be three-dimensional. Also,
and this is really neat, if you break a hologram into tiny pieces, you can still
see the entire object in any of the pieces: smash a glass hologram of a cup
into bits and you can still see the entire cup in any of the bits!
How do you make a hologram?
You make a hologram by reflecting a laser beam off the object you want to
capture.
In fact, you split the laser beam into two separate halves by shining it
through a half-mirror (a piece of glass coated with a thin layer of silver, so
half the laser light is reflected, and half passes through—sometimes called
a semi-silvered mirror). One half of the beam bounces off a mirror, hits the
object, and reflects onto the photographic plate inside which the hologram
will be created. This is called the object beam. The other half of the beam
bounces off another mirror and hits the same photographic plate. This is
called the reference beam. A hologram forms where the two beams meet
up in the plate.
Application
What can we use holograms for?
Until the 1980s, holograms were a slightly wacky scientific idea. Then
someone found a way of printing them onto metallic film and they became
an incredibly important form of security. Proper glass holograms look much
more impressive than the tiny metallic ones you see on banknotes and
credit cards, and you often see them used in jewellery or other decorative
items: you can even have holographic pictures hanging on your wall with
eyes that really do follow you around the room! In the 1980s, a British
theatre even projected a hologram of Laurence Olivier on stage to save the
actor (who was, by then, quite elderly) the hassle of appearing in person
each night. Lots of artists have experimented with making holographic
pictures, including the Spanish surrealist, Salvador Dali. Holograms also
have important medical and scientific uses. In a technique called
holographic interferometry, scientists can make a hologram of something
like an engine part and store it as a "three-dimensional photograph" for
later reference. If they make another hologram of the engine part at some
later date, comparing the two holograms quickly shows up any changes in
the engine that may indicate signs of wear or impending failure.
No-one's yet found a good way of making moving pictures with holograms,
but it's probably only a matter of time. Once that happens, we can look
forward to three-dimensional holographic TV and a whole new era of super-
realistic entertainment!
Conclusion
Holographic projection or Holography is the only visual recording and
playback process that can record our 3-dimensional worlds on a 2-
dimensional recording medium playback the original object or scene to
the unaided eyes as a 3-dimensional image. The image demonstrates
complete parallax and depth of field and floats in space either behind, in
front of, or straddling the recording medium. In both the types whether it
is reflection or transmission the formations of holograms have same
nature and dimensions. Holography has a wide range of applications in
the field of medical. Space science, military etc. Unlike photography the
limitations in the case of a holographic projection and its devices are
very limited and less.

Hologram

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Introduction

What is the Physics?

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