This book is an introduction to holographic interferometry - a field of holography having a great number of important and practically useful ap pl ications. It is intended for special ists working in the field of optics and holography, and also for students of the relevant specialities. At present, a gr eater and greater number of mechanica 1 engi neers, tur bine designers, testers of diverse equipment, biologists, crystallographers, and so on have to do with holographic interferometry. To allow these spe cialists, who are comparatively far from optics, to master the subject too, the main content of the book is preceded by an introductory chapter treating the fundamental concepts of the interference of light, optical interferometry, holography and holographic interferometry. The following chapters deal with the fundamentals of the theory of ho lographic interferometry and of experimental equipment. The authors have set themselves the task of sharing their more than ten year of experience of work in the field of holographic interferometry with their readers. In this connection, the questions which they dealt with directly are con sidered in somewhat greater detail, as a rule, than those with which they have become acquainted only from publications on the subject. A sufficiently detailed (although far from complete) bibliography gives any interested reader an opportunity to improve his knowledge of this field."

This book is intended to be an introductory text for engineers and physicists who are likely to be involved in the area of optical fiber communications. Its purpose is to provide the student with an explanatory text that can al so be used for "self-study." Thus, key theoretical resul ts have been rather thoroughly derived, and detailed explanations have been given wherever cer tain steps have been excluded. Some of the derivations are in new form, which the reader will hopefully find stimulating. In addition, some of the ex perimental and theoretical results are based on the research of the authors, and they are published here for the first time. However, references are given for all those cases involving equivalent results obtained by others. Although a large number of monographs are available for the specialist or the knowledgeable scientist, most of these are inadequate for teaching pur poses. This aspect served as a major motivation for writing a book that ex plains the basic phenomena and techniques. The required material was partly developed in earlier courses on integrated optics and optical fiber commu nications, and partly resulted from the authors' close cooperation with in dustry. To assess the suitability of the material, the manuscript of the book was used with encouraging results for a graduate course (spring sem ester, 1980) at the Communications Laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology."