Abstract
Random scattering of light in disordered media is an intriguing phenomenon of fundamental relevance to various applications1. Although techniques such as wavefront shaping and transmission matrix measurements2,3 have enabled remarkable progress in advanced imaging concepts4–11, the most successful strategy to obtain clear images through a disordered medium remains the filtering of ballistic light12–14. Ballistic photons with a scattering-free propagation are, however, exponentially rare and no known method has been able to increase their proportion. To address these limitations, we introduce and experimentally implement a new set of optical states that we term scattering invariant modes, whose transmitted field pattern is the same, irrespective of whether they scatter through a disordered sample or propagate ballistically through a homogeneous medium. We observe scattering invariant modes that are only weakly attenuated in dense scattering media, and show in simulations that their correlations with the ballistic light can be used to improve imaging inside scattering materials.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 431-434 |
| Journal | Nature Photonics |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 8 Apr 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We acknowledge helpful discussions with P. Ambichl, D. Bouchet, S. Faez, D. van Oosten, P. Jurrius, D. Killian, C. R. de Kok, F. Salihbegovic and S. Steinhauer. Financial support was provided by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under project WAVELAND (grant number P32300 to S.R.) and by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO (grant number Vici-68047618 to A.P.M.). The computational results presented in this paper were achieved using the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
Funding
We acknowledge helpful discussions with P. Ambichl, D. Bouchet, S. Faez, D. van Oosten, P. Jurrius, D. Killian, C. R. de Kok, F. Salihbegovic and S. Steinhauer. Financial support was provided by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under project WAVELAND (grant number P32300 to S.R.) and by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO (grant number Vici-68047618 to A.P.M.). The computational results presented in this paper were achieved using the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC).