Because its underlying principles are so fundamental, holography has been studied and applied in many areas of science. Recently, a technique has been developed which takes the maximum advantage of the fundamental principles and extracts much more information from a hologram than is customarily associated with such a measurement. In this paper the fundamental principles of holography are reviewed, and a sound radiation measurement system, called nearfield acoustic holography (NAH), which fully exploits the fundamental principles, is described.

When a new crystalline material is discovered, one of the first fundamental properties to be determined is the atomic structure, defined by the minimum in the free energy with respect to the positions of the atoms. Another fundamental characteristic of interest is the curvature of the free energy in the vicinity of the minimum, and this would be manifest in the elastic constants for the material. As derivatives of the free energy, elastic constants are closely connected to thermodynamic properties of the material. They can be related to the specific heat, the Debye temperature and the Gruneisen parameter (which relates the thermal expansion coefficient to the specific heat at constant volume), and they can be used to check theoretical models. Extensive quantitative connections among thermodynamic properties can be made if the elastic constants are known as functions of temperature and pressure. The damping of elastic waves provides information on anharmonicity and on coupling with electrons and other relaxation mechanisms. The elastic properties are perhaps most valuable as probes of phase transitions, such as superconductivity transitions. Clearly precise and accurate measurements of elastic constants furnish significant information about materials.

The use of mechanical resonances to determine the elastic moduli of materials of interest to condensed-matter physics, engineering, materials science and more is a steadily evolving process. With the advent of massive computing capability in an ordinary personal computer, it is now possible to find all the elastic moduli of low-symmetry solids using sophisticated analysis of a set of the lowest resonances. This process, dubbed "resonant ultrasound spectroscopy" or RUS, provides the highest absolute accuracy of any routine elastic modulus measurement technique, and it does this quickly on small samples. RUS has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, but still lacking is a complete description of how to make such measurements with hardware and software easily available to the general science community. In this article, we describe how to implement realistically a useful RUS system.

We have studied the thermal history of the resonant frequency of a torsional oscillator containing solid 4 He. We find that the magnitude of the frequency shift that occurs below ∼100 mK is multivalued in the low temperature limit, with the exact value depending on how the state is prepared. This result can be qualitatively explained in terms of the motion and pinning of quantized vortices within the sample. Several aspects of the data are also consistent with the response of dislocation lines to oscillating stress fields imposed on the solid.

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