High-gain and high-speed wavefront shaping through scattering media
Abstract
Wavefront shaping (WFS) is emerging as a promising tool for controlling and focusing light in complex scattering media. The shaping system’s speed, the energy gain of the corrected wavefronts and the control degrees of freedom are the most important metrics for WFS, especially for highly scattering and dynamic samples. Despite recent advances, current methods suffer from trade-offs that limit satisfactory performance to only one or two of these metrics. Here we report a WFS technique that simultaneously achieves high speed, high energy gain and high control degrees of freedom. By combining photorefractive crystal-based analogue optical phase conjugation and stimulated emission light amplification, our technique achieves an energy gain approaching unity; that is, more than three orders of magnitude larger than conventional analogue optical phase conjugation. The response time of ~10 μs with about 106 control modes corresponds to an average mode time of about 0.01 ns per mode, which is more than 50 times quicker than some of the fastest WFS systems so far. We anticipate that this technique will be instrumental in overcoming the optical diffusion limit in photonics and translate WFS techniques to real-world applications.
Yide Zhang
NIH K99 Postdoctoral Fellow
My research is interdisciplinary and focused on developing new types of optical imaging techniques that could advance the work of other researchers and medical personnel in a wide variety of fields. Currently, I am developing next-generation photoacoustic and ultrafast imaging techniques that can observe biological and physical phenomena that are too fast to be imaged with existing methods. The observation of the ultrafast phenomena could provide a better understanding of the fundamentals of life and physical sciences. I am also developing novel quantum imaging approaches that can investigate biological organisms with an imaging performance that cannot be achieved using classical optical imaging. In my free time, I enjoy cooking, hiking, cycling, and traveling.