Scenario—A day in the life of a holographer

Maria works for a company that has received a new contract from a software firm for producing 1,000,000 small holograms to be used as security seals on all its products. Having been trained as a holography technician, Maria is responsible for making the master hologram by using the three-dimensional model of a logo provided by the customer. She sets up the basic split-beam, focused-image, reflection-hologram configuration on the optical table and aligns the components using techniques learned in the holography course she completed in school. She produces an excellent holographic image of the logo that seems to stick out from the surface when illuminated with any point source of white light. She then hands the image to her friend, another technician in the replication department, who treats the hologram as if it were an original object and makes a million copies of it using rolls of photopolymers. All this is in a day’s work for Maria and her friend.