Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I'm working on a hologram topic in a high school physics debate tournament, and we have problem finding out how it works and which kind of plastic is most suitable to "scratch" a hologram. We already have read some reference and have the tools to scratch. However, most of the holograms we found were another kind which is not I am researching on. Can someone give a specific answer or any website which is easy to comprehend. Thank you very much!

If you need some basic information you can go to this website: http://ilyam.org/FDD_2014_IYPT_Reference_kit.pdf
however, the information is not enough for us.

Hello brandonchen32,

I suggest doing an experiment with several types of plastic to see which material produces the clearest abrasion hologram. For further discussion of the science that underlies scratch holography, I did a Google search for "specular holography theory", which returned numerous results. A nice paper was published in Applied Optics in 2011. The article is "Specular holography" by Matthew Brand.

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ao/abstra ... 50-25-5042

I'm on my university's network so I can access the full text; I'm not sure if you will be able to access it directly. If not, you may visit a local college or university and see if you can access the article that way.