Holography with laser beams is commonplace. Now, F Shimizu and others at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan, have used waves of neon atoms to form a small physical image. The image is coded as an interference pattern between two laser beams (a reflected and a reference beam) and is then read by another beam. In this experiment, the letters NEC were etched out on a membrane using electron beam lithography.