Robust multiple focusing through scattering media via feedback wavefront shaping

Abstract

The control of multiply-scattered light has greatly boosted the understanding of optics in complex photonic systems, leading to many applications including imaging, information processing, random lasing, to name just a few. Here, we demonstrate a real-time feedback approach to realize multiple focusing of multiply-scattered light, which is more robust to the inherent background field compared to the time reversal approach. Our method retrieves the optimized wavefront by aligning the high-dimensional vector of the measured pattern with that of the target pattern. Our theoretical simulations and experimental results show that the feedback approach is capable of constructing homogeneous diffraction-limited spots at predefined positions. Moreover, the peak-to-background ratio exhibits a sub-1/m decay with m being the number of focuses, indicating the excellent capability of the proposed approach to focus scattered light at multiple positions. This efficient approach provides a promising avenue toward complex control on scattered light in complex photonic media, and therefore would be useful in relevant applications such as optical imaging and optical manipulation.