Compensation of Aberrations due to a Wavelength Shift in Holography

A shift in wavelength between the recording and reconstruction beams of a hologram introduces aberrations in the image wavefront and decreases the diffraction efficiency. The holograms investigated in this paper are recorded on dichromate gelatin film with either plane waves or point sources and are designed to image to a point source when illuminated with a plane wave. A computer program is employed to calculate the aberrations present in the image wavefront and to determine an optimized recording geometry necessary for minimum aberrations. It is shown that the computer program, which was designed for surface-type holograms, has some application in thick transmission-type phase holograms. The experimental results are in close agreement with the computed results indicating that compensation for the wavelength shift may be obtained by using a computer program to calculate the proper recording geometry.