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A sampling of papers is assembled to represent the active field of controlled light propagation through complex media.
© 2015 Optical Society of America
1. Introduction
Optical imaging is ubiquitous in our society, and has pervaded essentially every aspect of our daily lives. The ability to transmit and control light at macroscopic and microscopic scales is indispensable in fields including healthcare, defense, communication, and consumer goods. Until recently, a core tenet of the science and engineering of light has been that beam propagation and imaging are possible only when the light path is relatively clear. Strongly scattering environments are well known to pose an enormous challenge in the transmission of information. For example, wireless communication is adversely affected by complex urban environments; radar communication is adversely affected by weather; underwater acoustic communication and imaging are adversely affected by turbidity.
However, in recent years, it has become increasingly evident that the effects of scattering on light are not irrevocable. Information transmission through complex media is often not necessarily lost, but rather it becomes scrambled. In principle, there is hope to recover this information by undoing the effects of scattering. This hope is now becoming practice.
The papers assembled in this focus issue are intended to represent a sampling of the field. In particular, this issue is somewhat unusual in that it contains three review papers [1–3], providing a view of the field from different vantage points and targeted to audiences of different degrees of expertise. To avoid significant overlap, the authors of these reviews were requested to emphasize their own work. The remaining papers are solicited original research papers, covering disparate topics such as the properties of light propagation through complex media [4–6], the control of light propagation by measurement strategies of the transmission matrix between spatial light modulator and detector [7–9], applications of controlled propagation to in-vivo imaging in biological tissue [9,10], and numerical considerations of non-standard adaptive optics configurations [11]. These topics are by no means meant to span the field in its entirety. Nevertheless, they provide windows into some of the new and exciting directions being taken in the field of light propagation through complex media.
References and links
1. I. M. Vellekoop, “Feedback-based wavefront shaping,” Opt. Express 23(9), 12189–12206 (2015). [PubMed]
2. M. Kim, W. Choi, Y. Choi, C. Yoon, and W. Choi, “The transmission matrix of scattering medium and its applications in biophotonics,” Opt. Express 23(10), 12648–12668 (2015). [CrossRef]
3. Z. Shi, M. Davy, and A. Z. Genack, “Statistics and control of waves in disordered media,” Opt. Express 23(9), 12293–12320 (2015). [CrossRef] [PubMed]
4. S. F. Liew and H. Cao, “Modification of light transmission channels by inhomogeneous absorption in random media,” Opt. Express 23(9), 11043–11053 (2015). [PubMed]
5. S. Schott, J. Bertolotti, J.-F. Leger, L. Bourdieu, and S. Gigan, “Characterization of the angular memory effect of scattered light in biological tissues,” Opt. Express 23(10), 13505–13516 (2015). [CrossRef]
6. V. Bianco, V. Marchesano, A. Finizio, M. Paturzo, and P. Ferraro, “Self-propelling bacteria mimic coherent light decorrelation,” Opt. Express 23(7), 9388–9396 (2015). [CrossRef] [PubMed]
7. A. Drémeau, A. Liutkus, D. Martina, O. Katz, C. Schülke, F. Krzakala, S. Gigan, and L. Daudet, “Reference-less measurement of the transmission matrix of a highly scattering material using a DMD and phase retrieval techniques,” Opt. Express 23(9), 11898–11911 (2015). [CrossRef] [PubMed]
8. J. Yoon, K. Lee, J. Park, and Y. Park, “Measuring optical transmission matrices by wavefront shaping,” Opt. Express 23(8), 10158–10167 (2015). [CrossRef] [PubMed]
9. X. Tao, D. Bodington, M. Reinig, and J. Kubby, “High-speed scanning interferometric focusing by fast measurement of binary transmission matrix for channel demixing,” in press (2015).
10. L. Kong and M. Cui, “In vivo neuroimaging through the highly scattering tissue via iterative multi-photon adaptive compensation technique,” Opt. Express 23(5), 6145–6150 (2015). [CrossRef] [PubMed]
11. T.-W. Wu and M. Cui, “Numerical study of multi-conjugate large area wavefront correction for deep tissue microscopy,” Opt. Express 23(6), 7463–7470 (2015). [CrossRef] [PubMed]