Geometrical and dynamical phase have competing effects as far a scattering of light form inhomogeneous anisotropic optical medium is concerned. If fine-tuned appropriately, these effects can completely cancel each other for a chosen spin component while having an additive effect on the orthogonal components. Here, we show a manifestation of extraordinary spin selective modes in Fourier spectrum of Gaussian beam transmitted through anisotropic disordered medium. We realize the concept using a twisted nematic liquid crystal-based spatial light modulator (SLM) with random gray level distribution for incident Gaussian beam.
We demonstrate experimentally that optical wavefront shaping selectively couples light into the fundamental diffusion mode of a scattering medium. The total energy density inside a scattering medium of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles was probed by measuring the emitted fluorescent power of spheres that were randomly positioned inside the medium. The fluorescent power of an optimized incident wave front is observed to be enhanced compared to a non-optimized incident front. The observed enhancement increases with sample thickness. Based on diffusion theory, we derive a model wherein the distribution of energy density of wavefront-shaped light is described by the fundamental diffusion mode. The agreement between our model and the data is striking not in the least since there are no adjustable parameters. Enhanced total energy density is crucial to increase the efficiency of white LEDs, solar cells, and of random lasers, as well as to realize controlled illumination in biomedical optics.
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.
We show that the spatial distribution of the energy density of optimally shaped waves inside a scattering medium can be described by considering only a few of the lowest eigenfunctions of the diffusion equation. Taking into account only the fundamental eigenfunction, the total internal energy inside the sample is underestimated by only 2%. The spatial distribution of the shaped energy density is very similar to the fundamental eigenfunction, up to a cosine distance of about 0.01. We obtained the energy density inside a quasi-1D disordered waveguide by numerical calculation of the joined scattering matrix. Computing the transmission-averaged energy density over all transmission channels yields the ensemble averaged energy density of shaped waves. From the averaged energy density obtained, we reconstruct its spatial distribution using the eigenfunctions of the diffusion equation. The results from our study have exciting applications in controlled biomedical imaging, efficient light harvesting in solar cells, enhanced energy conversion in solid-state lighting, and low threshold random lasers.
Using tempered Monte Carlo simulations, we study the the spin-glass phase of dense packings of Ising dipoles pointing along random axes. We consider systems of L^3 dipoles (a) placed on the sites of a simple cubic lattice with lattice constant $d$, (b) placed at the center of randomly closed packed spheres of diameter d that occupy a 64% of the volume. For both cases we find an equilibrium spin-glass phase below a temperature T_sg. We compute the spin-glass overlap parameter q and their associated correlation length xi_L. From the variation of xi_L with T and L we determine T_sg for both systems. In the spin-glass phase, we find (a) <q> decreases algebraically with L, and (b) xi_L/L does not diverge as L increases. At very low temperatures we find comb-like distributions of q that are sample-dependent. We find that the fraction of samples with cross-overlap spikes higher than a certain value as well as the average width of the spikes are size independent quantities. All these results are consistent with a quasi-long-range order in the spin-glass phase, as found previously for very diluted dipolar systems.
We introduce a new type of states for light in multimode waveguides featuring strongly enhanced or reduced spectral correlations. Based on the experimentally measured multi-spectral transmission matrix of a multimode fiber, we generate a set of states that outperform the established principal modes in terms of the spectral stability of their output spatial field profiles. Inverting this concept also allows us to create states with a minimal spectral correlation width, whose output profiles are considerably more sensitive to a frequency change than typical input wavefronts. The resulting super- and anti-principal modes are made orthogonal to each other even in the presence of mode-dependent loss. By decomposing them in the principal mode basis, we show that the super-principal modes are formed via interference of principal modes with closeby delay times, whereas the anti-principal modes are a superposition of principal modes with the most different delay times available in the fiber. Such novel states are expected to have broad applications in fiber communication, imaging, and spectroscopy.