Coherence holography: principle and applications

We review the principle and the applications of unconventional holography, called coherence holography1,2, which we recently proposed as a general technique for the synthesis and the control of 3-D spatial coherence function. An object recorded in a hologram is reconstructed as the three-dimensional distribution of a complex spatial coherence function, rather than as the complex amplitude distribution of the optical field itself that usually represents the reconstructed image in conventional holography. We introduce a newly proposed simple optical geometry for the direct visualization of the reconstructed coherence image, along with the experimental results validating the proposed principle. We also show that coherence holography has potential applications in optical coherence tomography and profilometry3 as well as in basic science of coherence vortices4.