• Open Access

Customizing the Angular Memory Effect for Scattering Media

Hasan Yılmaz, Matthias Kühmayer, Chia Wei Hsu, Stefan Rotter, and Hui Cao
Phys. Rev. X 11, 031010 – Published 15 July 2021
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Abstract

The memory effect in disordered systems is a key physical phenomenon that has been employed for optical imaging, metrology, and communication through opaque media. Under the conventional memory effect, when the incident beam is tilted slightly, the transmitted pattern tilts in the same direction. However, the “memory” is limited in its angular range and tilt direction. Here, we present a general approach to customize the memory effect by introducing an angular memory operator. Its eigenstates possess perfect correlation for tilt angles and directions that can be arbitrarily chosen separately for the incident and transmitted waves, and can be readily realized with wave front shaping. This work reveals the power of wave front shaping in creating any desired memory for applications of classical and quantum waves in complex systems.

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  • Received 5 November 2020
  • Accepted 11 May 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031010

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & OpticalCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Hasan Yılmaz1,2, Matthias Kühmayer3, Chia Wei Hsu4, Stefan Rotter3, and Hui Cao1,*

  • 1Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
  • 2Institute of Materials Science and Nanotechnology, National Nanotechnology Research Center (UNAM), Bilkent University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey
  • 3Institute for Theoretical Physics, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), A-1040 Vienna, Austria
  • 4Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA

  • *hui.cao@yale.edu

Popular Summary

To see through an opaque medium, researchers have begun to focus on harnessing hidden correlations of seemingly random speckles formed by the interference of light scattered through the medium. The most widely used type of correlations is known as the angular memory effect: Tilting the incident wave front of a coherent beam on a diffusive medium tilts the transmitted wave front in the same direction by the same amount. However, its small angular range and the fact that the tilt directions are always the same for input and output light limit practical applications. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a general approach to tailor the angular memory effect at will, in any random scattering medium.

In our method, first we measure the scattering medium’s transmission matrix, a mathematical object that encodes how incident light relates to transmitted light. Then, performing certain transformations on the transmission matrix, we define an “angular memory operator,” a mathematical tool that encodes how to shape the wave front of the incident light to customize the angular memory effect for arbitrarily chosen input and output angles. The input and output angles are determined while defining the operator.

Our work opens the door to customize the memory effect of both classical and quantum waves for imaging, metrology, and communication applications in a diverse set of complex scattering systems.

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Vol. 11, Iss. 3 — July - September 2021

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