Spatial coherence of light inside three-dimensional media

Marco Leonetti (), Lorenzo Pattelli, Simone Panfilis, Diederik S. Wiersma and Giancarlo Ruocco
Additional contact information
Marco Leonetti: Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)
Lorenzo Pattelli: Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRiM)
Simone Panfilis: Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)
Diederik S. Wiersma: Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRiM)
Giancarlo Ruocco: Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Speckle is maybe the most fundamental interference effect of light in disordered media, giving rise to fascinating physical phenomena and cutting edge applications. While speckle formed outside a sample is easily measured and analysed, true bulk speckle, as formed inside random media, is difficult to investigate directly due to the obvious issue of physical access. Furthermore, its proper theoretical description poses enormous challenges. Here we report on the first direct measurements of spatially resolved intensity correlations of light inside a disordered medium, using embedded DNA strings decorated with emitters separated by a controlled nanometric distance. Our method provides in situ access to fundamental properties of bulk speckles as their size and polarization degrees of freedom, both of which are found to deviate significantly from theoretical predictions. The deviations are explained, by comparison with rigorous numerical calculations, in terms of correlations among polarization components and non-universal near-field contributions at the nanoscale.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23978-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-23978-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23978-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().