Holography with a neutron interferometer

Abstract

We use a Mach-Zehnder interferometer to perform neutron holography of a spiral phase plate. The object beam passes through a spiral phase plate, acquiring the phase twist characteristic of orbital angular momentum states. The reference beam passes through a fused silica prism, acquiring a linear phase gradient. The resulting hologram is a fork dislocation image, which could be used to reconstruct neutron beams with various orbital angular momenta. This work paves the way for novel applications of neutron holography, diffraction and imaging.