Light guiding through suspensions of red blood cells

Abstract

The conservation of optical properties of light through scattering media allows the transmission of high bandwidth information. In this work, we utilize the nonlinear self-trapping and self-guiding of a laser beam to form several centimeters long self-arranged biological waveguides in suspensions of sheep red blood cells. To increase the range of transmitted wavelength through the scattering media, a pump/probe-type nonlinear coupling has been implemented, where the self-formed waveguide conducts weaker light at different wavelengths. Finally, we demonstrate the conservation of polarization state and orbital angular momentum of the transmitted light through these biological waveguides. The ability to create waveguides and maintain optical properties after multiple scattering events may lead to improvements in communication bandwidth with low loss through scattering media and allow development of new biomedical devices.