Measuring the scattering tensor of a disordered nonlinear medium

Nonlinear materials add another dimension to light scattering

26 December 2023

What happens to light that is both scattered and doubled in frequency has been described mathematically for the first time.

Shine laser light through a material that scatters light in multiple random directions such as ground glass, and you will observe a characteristic speckled pattern. Mathematically, this scattering can be described by a 2D array of numbers known as a matrix.

The scrambling of the input light has implications for areas such as optical microscopy and optical information processing.

But what happens when the scattering material interacts with light in a complex, nonlinear way?

To find out, four scientists from the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea and a collaborator used nonlinear scatterers that double the wavelength of light.

They discovered that the scattering of the frequency-doubled light can be described by a 3D tensor — a stack of 2D matrices.

The team showed that this has implications for optical computing and machine learning.

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References

1. Nature Physics 19, 1709–1718 (2023). doi: 10.1038/s41567-023-02163-8