Fixation-free bleached silver halide transmission holograms recorded on Slavich PFG-01 red sensitive plates

Bleaching is one of the most widely used techniques in the production of phase holograms of high quality on photographic emulsion, particularly in rehalogenating techniques without a fixation step. These techniques were very well understood when Agfa 8E75 HD emulsion was used for the recording. Production of Agfa material for applications to holography ceased in 1997, so these techniques must be optimized for the silver halide materials which are currently available. In this paper we present experimental results for fixation-free rehalogenating bleached holograms derived from the Slavich PFG-01 emulsion, a red-sensitive fine-grained emulsion from the Slavich Company. The influence of the potassium bromide concentration in the bleach solution on the final quality of the holograms is studied. The concentrations of the different components of the bleach solution are adjusted to obtain the highest values of the diffraction efficiency. A comparative study is also made with bleached holograms recorded on Agfa 8E75 HD plates. We will show that high diffraction efficiencies can be obtained when fixation-free rehalogenating bleached holograms are recorded on Slavich PFG-01 plates.This work was partially financed by the CICYT (Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología, CICYT, Spain) under project no. MAT97-0705-C02-02