Abstract
Focusing of light in the diffusive regime inside scattering media has long been considered impossible. Recently, this limitation has been overcome with time reversal of ultrasound-encoded light (TRUE), but the resolution of this approach is fundamentally limited by the large number of optical modes within the ultrasound focus. Here, we introduce a new approach, time reversal of variance-encoded light (TROVE), which demixes these spatial modes by variance encoding to break the resolution barrier imposed by the ultrasound. By encoding individual spatial modes inside the scattering sample with unique variances, we effectively uncouple the system resolution from the size of the ultrasound focus. This enables us to demonstrate optical focusing and imaging with diffuse light at an unprecedented, speckle-scale lateral resolution of ∼5 µm.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank I. Vellekoop for discussions and P. Willems for comments on the manuscript. B.J. is recipient of a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. Y.M.W. acknowledges support from the National Science Scholarship, awarded by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore. This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health (1DP2OD007307-01) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (W31P4Q-11-1-0008).
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B.J. and Y.M.W. contributed equally to this work. B.J. conceived the idea. B.J. and Y.M.W. developed the idea, with the help of R.H., A.M. and C.Y. The experiment was designed by B.J. and Y.M.W., who also built the set-up, collected data, performed the simulation and data analysis, and wrote the manuscript. R.H. contributed to the manuscript and to the simulation results. R.H. and A.M. contributed to analysis and mathematical derivation. C.Y. supervised the project and contributed to the manuscript.
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Judkewitz, B., Wang, Y., Horstmeyer, R. et al. Speckle-scale focusing in the diffusive regime with time reversal of variance-encoded light (TROVE). Nature Photon 7, 300–305 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.31
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