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Phase conjugation with spatially incoherent light in complex media

Nature Photonics volume 17, pages 1114–1119 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Shaping light deep inside complex media such as biological tissue is critical to many research fields. Although the coherent control of scattered light via wavefront shaping has led to substantial advances in addressing this challenge, controlling light over extended or multiple targets without physical access to the inside of a medium remains elusive. Here we present a phase conjugation method for spatially incoherent light, which enables non-invasive light control based on incoherent emission from multiple target positions. Our method characterizes the scattering responses of hidden sources by retrieving mutually incoherent scattered fields from speckle patterns. By time-reversing scattered fluorescence with digital phase conjugation, we experimentally demonstrate focusing of light on individual and multiple targets. We also demonstrate maximum energy delivery to an extended target through a scattering medium by exploiting transmission eigenchannels. This paves the way to control light propagation in complex media using incoherent contrasts mechanisms.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of phase conjugation with incoherent fluorescence.
Fig. 2: Incoherent phase conjugation for multiple targets.
Fig. 3: Selective focusing on individual targets.
Fig. 4: Targeted energy delivery.

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Data availability

All relevant data are available from the authors on reasonable request.

Code availability

All of the relevant code is available from the authors on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by H2020 Future and Emerging Technologies (grant no. 863203 to Y.B., H.B.d.A. and S.G.), European Research Council (grant no. 724473 to S.G.) and Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (grant no. 2022R1A6A3A03072108 to Y.B.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Collège de France, Paris, France

    YoonSeok Baek, Hilton B. de Aguiar & Sylvain Gigan

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  2. Hilton B. de Aguiar
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  3. Sylvain Gigan
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Contributions

Y.B. conceived the idea. Y.B., H.B.d.A. and S.G. developed the concept and designed the experiments. Y.B. built the experimental set-up, performed the experiments and analysed the data. All of the authors discussed the results and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to YoonSeok Baek.

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Nature Photonics thanks Jacopo Bertolotti and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Sections 1–7 and Figs. 1–6.

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Baek, Y., de Aguiar, H.B. & Gigan, S. Phase conjugation with spatially incoherent light in complex media. Nat. Photon. 17, 1114–1119 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01254-5

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