Ultrashort pulse propagation and the Anderson localization

TL;DR

This paper studies how ultrashort light pulses behave in random media, using numerical simulations to explore the effects of disorder on pulse propagation and localization.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical approach combining molecular dynamics and FDTD simulations to analyze ultrashort pulse dynamics in disordered media.

Findings

Energy velocity decreases with increased disorder

Decay time correlates with localization length

Pulse localization effects are quantified

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of a 10 fs light pulse propagating in a random medium by the direct solution of the 3D Maxwell equations. Our approach employs molecular dynamics to generate a distribution of spherical scatterers and a parallel finite-difference time-domain code for the vectorial wave propagation. We calculate the disorder-averaged energy velocity and the decay time of the transmitted pulse Versus the localization length for an increasing refractive index.