The temporal evolution of an atomic wave packet interacting with object and
reference electromagnetic waves is investigated beyond the weak perturbation of
the initial state. It is shown that the diffraction of an ultracold atomic beam
by the inhomogeneous laser field can be interpreted as if the beam passes
through a three-dimensional hologram, whose thickness is proportional to the
interaction time. It is found that the diffraction efficiency of such a
hologram may reach 100% and is determined by the duration of laser pulses. On
this basis a method for reconstruction of the object image with matter waves is
offered.Comment: RevTeX, 13 pages, 8 figures; minor grammatical change