Nonlinear coherent transport of waves in disordered media

TL;DR

This paper develops a non-perturbative diagrammatic theory for coherent backscattering in nonlinear disordered media, revealing how nonlinearity significantly alters the backscattering enhancement, supported by numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel non-perturbative theoretical framework for understanding nonlinear coherent wave transport in disordered media.

Findings

Nonlinearity reduces the coherent backscattering enhancement factor.

The theory applies to optical and matter wave scattering in disordered nonlinear media.

Numerical simulations confirm the theoretical predictions.

Abstract

We present a diagrammatic theory for coherent backscattering from disordered dilute media in the nonlinear regime. The approach is non-perturbative in the strength of the nonlinearity. We show that the coherent backscattering enhancement factor is strongly affected by the nonlinearity, and corroborate these results by numerical simulations. Our theory can be applied to several physical scenarios like scattering of light in nonlinear Kerr media, or propagation of matter waves in disordered potentials.