Characterization and application of new photopolymer recording media for usage in holography

Abstract

Holography, holographic interferometry, or holographic optical elements manufacturing are compromised by the shortcomings of used holographic recording materials. Classical materials such as silver-halide emulsions, their excellent sensitivity, resolution, spectral range are eclipsed by the necessity of wet chemical processing and by inherent noise. Other commonly used holographic materials are not much better, some of their parameters are good however compromised with other weak parameters. Recently, it has seemed that new properly designed and manufactured photopolymer recording materials can overcome most of these problems. The sandwich structure (glass-polymer-glass) of the recording media can be easily prepared from commercial available liquid photopolymers (Polygrama) and well balanced holographic recording media are obtained by this approach. This paper presents testing results and preliminary conclusions of sandwich photopolymer structures employed as a holographic recording media. Characterization of recording structures as well as real life holographic usage examples are done. Influence of development and hardening of photopolymer are shown. Innovative formula of used photopolymer enables easily to reach diffraction efficiency of structures close to 100 % with low dose of exposition energy.