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Speckle-scale focusing in the diffusive regime with time reversal of variance-encoded light (TROVE)

Nature Photonics volume 7, pages 300–305 (2013)Cite this article

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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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Figure 1: Schematic comparison of TRUE and TROVE focusing.
Figure 2: Characterization of frequency-shifted wavefronts at the ultrasound plane.
Figure 3: Visualization of speckle-scale optical focusing.
Figure 4: Point-spread function and image acquisition.

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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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Author notes

  1. Benjamin Judkewitz and Ying Min Wang: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Benjamin Judkewitz, Ying Min Wang, Roarke Horstmeyer & Changhuei Yang

  2. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT, UK

    Benjamin Judkewitz

  3. Princess Royal Hospital, Telford, TF1 6TF, UK

    Alexandre Mathy

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  1. Benjamin Judkewitz
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Contributions

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.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Benjamin Judkewitz or Ying Min Wang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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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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