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Focusing and compression of ultrashort pulses through scattering media

Nature Photonics volume 5, pages 372–377 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Light scattering in inhomogeneous media induces wavefront distortions that pose an inherent limitation in many optical applications. Examples where this occurs include microscopy, nanosurgery and astronomy. In recent years, ongoing efforts have made the correction of spatial distortions possible using wavefront-shaping techniques. However, when ultrashort pulses are used, scattering also induces temporal distortions, which hinder the use of such pulses in nonlinear processes such as multiphoton microscopy and quantum control experiments. Here, we show that correction of both spatial and temporal distortions can be achieved by manipulating only the spatial degrees of freedom of the incident wavefront. By optimizing a nonlinear signal, we demonstrate spatiotemporal focusing and compression of chirped ultrashort pulses through scattering media, and refocusing in both space and time of 100 fs pulses through thick brain and bone samples. Our results open up new possibilities for optical manipulation and nonlinear imaging in scattering media.

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Figure 1: Spatiotemporal focusing by optimizing 2PF: spatial characterization.
Figure 2: Spatiotemporal characterization of the scattered and optimized fields shown in Fig. 1, demonstrating pulse compression by spatial wavefront shaping.
Figure 3: Mechanism for temporal compression using only spatial degrees of freedom and random scattering.
Figure 4: Refocusing 100 fs TL pulses through 1-mm-thick brain tissue.
Figure 5: Spatiotemporal refocusing of 100 fs pulses through 500-µm-thick bone sample.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank E. Korkotian, G. Grigoryan and M. Segal for brain samples, N. Reznikov, J.M. Levitt and S. Weiner for the bone sample, R. Ozeri's group for the EMCCD camera, M. Covo for graphical design and D. Oron for fruitful discussions. This work was supported by grants from the Israel Science Foundation, the Israel Ministry of Science and the Crown Photonics Center.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Ori Katz, Eran Small, Yaron Bromberg & Yaron Silberberg

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  1. Ori Katz
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  2. Eran Small
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  4. Yaron Silberberg
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Contributions

O.K. conceived the idea. O.K., Y.B., E.S. and Y.S. designed the experiments. O.K., E.S. and Y.B. performed the experiments, analysed the data and carried out numerical simulations. All authors contributed to the writing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Yaron Silberberg.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Katz, O., Small, E., Bromberg, Y. et al. Focusing and compression of ultrashort pulses through scattering media. Nature Photon 5, 372–377 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.72

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