Gabor Holography Reinvented

Abstract: This paper presents a "reinvention" of Gabor Holography that does not suffer optically from the inherent twin-image problem originating back to Gabor's original Nobel Prize awarded invention. In-line or on-axis holography was ironically abandoned by its inventor Dennis Gabor himself and was effectively completely "re-placed" by so-called off-axis holography at the time when Gabor received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. However, Gabor Holography is today the method of choice in modern digital holography due to its inherent on-axis, common-path robustness, lower requirements to resolution of the image sensor (or recording material), shorter exposure time, relaxed mechanical stability and temporal coherence requirements. However, it still inherently suffers from the aforementioned twin-image problem and, hence, one will find an abundance of papers trying to overcome this challenge by iterative phase retrieval or machine learning based approaches. Gabor Holography Reinvented overcomes this long-lasting twin-image problem for the first time by optical means.