Recording and reproducing double-exposure Gabor holograms for forming shearing interferograms

This paper analyzes the operation of a shearing interferometer in fringes of infinite width in the case of double-exposure recording of a Gabor hologram by means of a negative lens. It shows that, at the stage of reproducing the hologram, a shearing interferogram is recorded in the Fourier plane that characterizes the axial wave aberrations of the optical system used to form the illumination wavefront of an amplitude scatterer, with a sensitivity increased by a factor of two for a fixed value of the shift. (C) 1997 The Optical Society of America.