Saint Louis University researchers reveal light fluctuations in complex media

Researchers have discovered that giant fluctuations in the enhancement factor of focused light can reveal hidden information about complex scattering media. The study, published in Nature Communications, was led by Hasan Yilmaz of Saint Louis University in collaboration with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Sorbonne Université.

When light passes through disordered opaque materials, such as biological tissue, it creates random speckle patterns. While wavefront shaping allows for the control of this interference to focus light, previous research focused primarily on the enhancement factor as a measure of performance. This new research demonstrates that the fluctuations in this factor, caused by long-range mesoscopic correlations, serve as an experimentally accessible probe to understand the underlying correlations within the scattering medium itself.