Exploring the origin of stronger survival of polarized vortex beams through scattering media

Abstract

Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have shown promise in deep tissue imaging, medical diagnostics, and optical communication due to their robust propagation properties through scattering media. The insight on the mechanism for stronger survival of OAM carrying beam in tissue-like turbid media is expected to contribute towards a better understanding of light transport in the presence of scattering, as well as guide optimization of the intensity, phase, and polarization structure of light for use in biomedical applications like in tissue imaging. We examine the scattering properties by studying the propagation of polarized vortex beams transmitted through tissue-like turbid scattering media. We demonstrate that the intensity profile has a much more profound effect on depolarization than the phase profile for LG beams. Our results indicate that the observed stronger propagation for the higher-order LG beams is due to a higher anisotropy factor g, as seen by the incident beam. We have performed the degree of polarization measurements for the forward scattered light in the case of both LG beams and perfect vortex beams with varying topological charges. A comparison between the observed depolarization trends for the two classes of OAM-carrying beams suggests that the robust scattering properties of the LG beams originate from the intensity profile while the phase profile does not seem to play a major role in the stronger survival of OAM-carrying beam in turbid media.