No Arabic abstract
The efficient delivery of light energy is a prerequisite for non-invasive imaging and stimulating of target objects embedded deep within a scattering medium. However, injected waves experience random diffusion by multiple light scattering, and only a small fraction reaches the target object. Here we present a method to counteract wave diffusion and to focus multiplescattered waves to the deeply embedded target. To realize this, we experimentally inject light to the reflection eigenchannels of a specific flight time where most of the multiple-scattered waves have interacted with the target object and maximize the intensity of the returning multiple-scattered waves at the selected time. For targets that are too deep to be visible by optical imaging, we demonstrated a more than 10-fold enhancement in light energy delivery in comparison with ordinary wave diffusion cases. This work will lay a foundation for enhancing the working depth of imaging, sensing, and light stimulation.
The recent advent of wave-shaping methods has demonstrated the focusing of light through and inside even the most strongly scattering materials. Typically in wavefront shaping, light is focused in an area with the size of one speckle spot. It has been shown that the intensity is not only increased in the target speckle spot, but also in an area outside the optimized speckle spot. Consequently, the total transmission is enhanced, even though only the intensity in a single speckle spot is controlled. Here, we experimentally study how the intensity enhancement on both interfaces of a scattering medium depends on the optimization area on the transmission side. We observe that as the optimization radius increases, the enhancement of the total transmitted intensity increases. We find a concomitant decrease of the total reflected intensity, which implies an energy redistribution between transmission and reflection channels. In addition, we find a qualitative evidence of a long-range reflection-transmission correlation. Our result is useful for efficient light harvesting in solar cells, multi-channel quantum secure communications, imaging, and complex beam delivery through a scattering medium.
Our everyday experience teaches us that the structure of a medium strongly influences how light propagates through it. A disordered medium, e.g., appears transparent or opaque, depending on whether its structure features a mean free path that is larger or smaller than the medium thickness. While the microstructure of the medium uniquely determines the shape of all penetrating light paths, recent theoretical insights indicate that the mean length of these paths is entirely independent of any structural medium property and thus also invariant with respect to a change in the mean free path. Here, we report an experiment that demonstrates this surprising property explicitly. Using colloidal solutions with varying concentration and particle size, we establish an invariance of the mean path length spanning nearly two orders of magnitude in scattering strength, from almost transparent to very opaque media. This very general, fundamental and counterintuitive result can be extended to a wide range of systems, however ordered, correlated or disordered, and has important consequences for many fields, including light trapping and harvesting for solar cells and more generally in photonic structure design.
Fluorescence microscopy is widely used in biological imaging, however scattering from tissues strongly limits its applicability to a shallow depth. In this work we adapt a methodology inspired from stellar speckle interferometry, and exploit the optical memory effect to enable fluorescence microscopy through a turbid layer. We demonstrate efficient reconstruction of micrometer-size fluorescent objects behind a scattering medium in epi-microscopy, and study the specificities of this imaging modality (magnification, field of view, resolution) as compared to traditional microscopy. Using a modified phase retrieval algorithm to reconstruct fluorescent objects from speckle images, we demonstrate robust reconstructions even in relatively low signal to noise conditions. This modality is particularly appropriate for imaging in biological media, which are known to exhibit relatively large optical memory ranges compatible with tens of micrometers size field of views, and large spectral bandwidths compatible with emission fluorescence spectra of tens of nanometers widths.
The inverse scattering problem, whose goal is to reconstruct an unknown scattering object from its scattered wave, is essential in fundamental wave physics and its wide applications in imaging sciences. However, it remains challenging to invert multiple scattering accurately and efficiently. Here, we exploit the modified Born series to demonstrate an inverse problem solver that efficiently and directly computes inverse multiple scattering without making any assumptions. The inversion process is based on a physically intuitive approach and can be easily extended to other exact forward solvers. We utilised the proposed method in optical diffraction tomography and numerically and experimentally demonstrated three-dimensional reconstruction of optically thick specimens with higher fidelity than those obtained using conventional methods based on the weak scattering approximation.
The optical medium analogy of a radiation field generated by either an exact gravitational plane wave or an exact electromagnetic wave in the framework of general relativity is developed. The equivalent medium of the associated background field is inhomogeneous and anisotropic in the former case, whereas it is inhomogeneous but isotropic in the latter. The features of light scattering are investigated by assuming the interaction region to be sandwiched between two flat spacetime regions, where light rays propagate along straight lines. Standard tools of ordinary wave optics are used to study the deflection of photon paths due to the interaction with the radiation fields, allowing for a comparison between the optical properties of the equivalent media associated with the different background fields.