X-ray Holography and holographic optics

In 1948 the Nobel Prize Laureate Denis Gabor proposed his famous ‘‘method of wave-front reconstruction’’ which opened the era of holography. In the 1960s with the development of optical lasers, E. N. Leith and J. Upatnieks demonstrated the first wave-front reconstruction by a hologram with a reference beam. Since this first successful hologram demonstration the method of holographic reconstruction has found applications in many different fields of arts, science and technology. Holographic optical elements were used in laser design and investigations of optical semiconductor laser light properties. The possibility of creating holograms in the X-ray range has also been discussed in a number of works.

However, such holograms have neither been fabricated nor tested until now except the case of simple holograms, focusing zone plates. Due to the absence of sensitive and high-resolution materials for X-ray holography, it seems to be more effective to use X-rays only in the reconstruction stage to produce images with micron resolution. A so-called ‘‘synthetic hologram’’ can be generated by computer and transferred into material using modern methods of microelectronics technology. The topic has become even more important with the construction of X-ray lasers in Germany and USA.

Here we show the first results of design, optimizing, fabricating and testing of synthetic optical and X-ray holograms.