Controlling the Propagation of Light through a Scattering Medium by Spatio-Temporal Wavefront Shaping

Abstract

In turbid media such as biological tissues and living organisms, light is scattered randomly so that it is very diffi cult to obtain useful information inside the area of interest. Even in such situation, wavefront shaping can be used to focus and manipulate the spatial and temporal properties of light by controlling the many degrees of freedom of the optical phase in the incident beam. In this review, we explain the principle of the wavefront shaping and describe a couple of the previous studies to demonstrate the viability of this method. We also discuss potential application to control the temporal properties of ultrafast laser pulses both in spatial and temporal domain. This approach will open many new ways for biological imaging and photonics by combining with nonlinear optical effects.