Adaptive Holography Interferometry in Liquid Crystal Light-valves

By performing two-beam coupling experiments in a liquid crystal light-valve, optical beam amplification is obtained as a strongly resonant process to which a narrow frequency bandwidth is associated. By exploiting this property, we realize an adaptive holographic interferometric system that is able to efficiently sensing displacements as small as fraction of picometers. The adaptive interferometer allows also to detect acoustic waves imparted as phase modulations in complex wavefronts, like speckle fields. Another example encompasses the nonlinear detection of angular accelerations.