Recycling of undiffracted laser light for reconstruction of holograms

When a laser source is used to illuminate a transmission hologram, the zero order beam is not utilised and is just wasted. The paper describes a new technique for economical utilisation of laser light by recycling the transmitted light to reconstruct a number of holograms simultaneously for viewing by a large number of observers. There is no danger to viewer who is exposed to the undiffracted laser beams transmitted through the hologram. The paper also discusses the diffraction efficiency requirement of successive hologram and the limit of number of holograms in the scheme.