Correlation-enhanced control of wave focusing in disordered media

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that long-range correlations in disordered media significantly enhance wave focusing control, especially for large target regions, by applying a mesoscopic physics framework and experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework incorporating mesoscopic correlations to predict wave control limits in disordered media, validated through experiments.

Findings

Control extent increases with target size beyond a threshold

Universal scaling laws describe transmission eigenvalue distributions

Experimental results agree with the filtered random matrix model

Abstract

A fundamental challenge in physics is controlling the propagation of waves in disordered media despite strong scattering from inhomogeneities. Spatial light modulators enable one to synthesize (shape) the incident wavefront, optimizing the multipath interference to achieve a specific behavior such as focusing light to a target region. However, the extent of achievable control was not known when the target region is much larger than the wavelength and contains many speckles. Here we show that for targets containing more than $g$ speckles, where $g$ is the dimensionless conductance, the extent of transmission control is substantially enhanced by the long-range mesoscopic correlations among the speckles. Using a filtered random matrix ensemble appropriate for coherent diffusion in open geometries, we predict the full distributions of transmission eigenvalues as well as universal scaling laws for statistical properties, in excellent agreement with our experiment. This work provides a general framework for describing wavefront-shaping experiments in disordered systems.