INSP - UPMC - 4 place Jussieu - 75005 Paris - Barre 22-23, 4^e étage, salle 317

Sylvain Gigan - Laboratoire Kastler Brossel

Abstract

Scattering of light in heterogeneous media, for instance the skin or a glass of milk, is usually considered an inevitable perturbation or even a nuisance. Through repeated scattering and interferences, this phenomenon seemingly destroys both the spatial and the phase information of any laser illumination. At the spatial level, it gives rise to the well-known “speckle” interference patterns. At the temporal (or spectral) level, a short pulse entering a scattering medium will see its length greatly extended due to the multiplicity of possible path length light can take before exiting the medium. From an operative point of view, scattering greatly limits the possibility to image or manipulate an object with light through or in a scattering medium. Multiple scattering is nonetheless an invaluable field of research for experimentalists and theoreticians alike, at the crossing of optics, condensed matter physics, statistical physics, chaos, to name just a few. The possibility of continuously varying the complexity of the structures from totally disordered (like suspensions in liquid) to ordered structures (like photonics crystals), from solid to granular or even liquid state, from simple scattering to resonant scattering, absorption, or even gain media, opens seemingly endless possibilities to investigate new physics phenomena. Multiple scattering is a highly complex but nonetheless deterministic process : it is therefore reversible. Speckle is coherent, and can be coherently controlled and manipulated. By « shaping » or « adapting » the incident light, it is in principle possible to control the propagation and overcome the scattering process. I will present recent results from our group showing how light control allows not only imaging through or in a disordered medium, but also other optical tasks such as optical trapping or coherent control.