When the reflected object beam and the reference beam are recombined, they create an interference pattern that encodes the 3-D image.

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When the two meet, the interference pattern produced, if captured on photographic film, has the ability to change a new reference beam into a new object beam.

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In a 35-nanosecond burst of laser light, 4.3 megabytes of a color image are burned on a photosensitive DuPont polymer film, rearranging the chemistry into a zebra-striped interference pattern.

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Moreover, since the resulting interference pattern also depends on the waves' frequency, the same array can concentrate SAWs in different ways at different frequencies, working the liquid sample in different ways.

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When the beams merge, they form an interference pattern.

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