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Creating impressions

Holography with laser beams is commonplace. Now, F Shimizu and others at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan, have used waves of neon atoms to form a small physical image. The image is coded as an interference pattern between two laser beams (a reflected and a reference beam) and is then read by another beam. In this experiment, the letters NEC were etched out on a membrane using electron beam lithography.

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