ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Holographic interferometry

Holographic interferometry is a cool way of seeing how things move or change! Imagine you have a magical camera that can take pictures that show you how something is moving or changing, even if you can't see it happening in real life. That's what holographic interferometry does!

So how does it work? First, you need a laser - this is like a really bright flashlight that shines a very thin beam of light. You shine the laser onto the object you want to study, but you don't just shine it straight on - instead, you shine it at an angle so that the light reflects off the object and bounces onto a piece of special film.

This special film is called holographic film, and it's like a weird kind of photo paper that can capture the way that the laser light bounces off the object. When the laser light hits the holographic film, it creates a special pattern of lines and curves that shows you how the object is moving or changing.

But wait, there's more! After you've taken your first picture, you change something about the object - maybe you heat it up, or cool it down, or make it vibrate, or move it a little bit. Then you shine the laser onto the object again, and take a second picture of the patterns created by the laser light bouncing off the object.

Now you take those two pictures - the "before" and "after" pictures - and hold them up in front of a special machine called a holographic interferometer. This machine uses those patterns on the holographic film to create a hologram - which is like a 3D picture that you can move around and look at from different angles! And when you look at that hologram, you can see how the object has changed between the two pictures you took.

That's a lot of big words and concepts, but the important thing to remember is this: holographic interferometry is like taking two pictures of an object and using special film and a machine to create a 3D picture that shows you how the object moved or changed between those two pictures. It's a really cool tool that helps scientists and engineers see things that they can't observe with their own eyes.
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