Scattering Optical Elements: Stand-Alone Optical Elements Exploiting Multiple Light Scattering

Abstract

Optical design and fabrication techniques are crucial for making optical elements. From conventional lenses to diffractive optical elements and to recent metasurfaces, various types of optical elements have been proposed to manipulate light where optical materials are fabricated into desired structures. Here, we propose a scattering optical element (SOE) that exploits multiple light scattering and wavefront shaping. Instead of fabricating optical materials, the SOE consists of a disordered medium and a photopolymer-based wavefront recorder, with shapes impinging on light on demand. With the proposed stand-alone SOEs, we experimentally demonstrate control of various properties of light, including intensity, polarization, spectral frequency, and near field. Due to the tremendous freedom brought about by disordered media, the proposed approach will provide unexplored routes to manipulate arbitrary optical fields in stand-alone optical elements.

Ultrahigh enhancement of light focusing through disordered media controlled by mega-pixel modes

“…The theoretical EF for the phase control and the binary amplitude control are represented with green and blue dashed lines, respectively. The EFs achieved with phase control [1, 19,27] and amplitude control [28,29] all ranged from 10-1000, which are all far smaller than the values in the present work. To our best knowledge, the current maximum number of pixels among commercially available SLMs is 4904 x 2464 (GAEA, HoloEye Photonics AG, Germany) for LCoS SLMs and 2560 x 1600 (DLP9000, Texas Instruments Inc., United States) for DMDs.…”

“…5. The experimental EF values for the three experiments corresponding to N = 2 18 , 2 19 and 2 20 were 27,322 ± 4,834; 54,812 ± 9,222; 101,391 ± 12,940, respectively.…”

“…(a) Intensity enhancement as a function of the number of controlling modes. The green, black and red color solid circles denote the experimental EFs for 10 trials for N = 2 18 , 219 and 2 20 modes, respectively. The blue dashed line represents the theoretical prediction.…”

High-Resolution Holographic Microscopy Exploiting Speckle-Correlation Scattering Matrix

“…In laboratory conditions, the calibrated information for a scattering later has been used for 24 hours without additional calibration (see Supplementary Figure 4). For highthroughput generation of scattering layers, the photopolymerization of a calibrated scattering layer 36 or an engineered scattering layer 37 can also be used with this method.…”

Deep learning enabled real time speckle recognition and hyperspectral imaging using a multimode fiber array

“…At the same time, improved understanding allows us to retrieve more information from seemingly random scattering fields to see around corners and through opaque media [2,3]. Control over light scattering has led to exciting new applications such as programmable multiport optical elements for classical and quantum states [4,5,6,7], quantum secure keys [8] and compressive sampling imaging systems [9].…”