Reconstruction characters of conventional holography using polarization-sensitive material

Polarization holography, recording the amplitude, phase, and polarization of signal wave, may be regarded as the superposition of conventional holography and orthogonal holography. The former implies the signal and reference waves have the identical polarization state in the recording stage, while the latter means that they have the orthogonal polarization state. It is a common sense that in conventional holography, the polarization state of a reconstructed wave is always identical to that of the reading wave. However, predicted by the tensor polarization holography theory, which has been confirmed by many experiments, the polarization state of a reconstructed wave may be different from that of a reading wave. Hence, a question that may arise is which one is correct and why. In this work, we derive the electrical field of a reconstructed wave generated from the hologram that was recorded by the identical elliptically polarized wave at a large angle. The theoretical result shows that there are three kinds of reconstruction characters, and they are confirmed by the designed experiments well. Through the analysis, we find the key to observing that the recording material should be polarization-sensitive; recorded by a nonpolarization sensitive material, the polarization state of the reconstructed wave is always identical to that of the reading wave. The work not only verifies the tensor polarization holography theory, it also enlarges our understanding about conventional holography. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group