Speckle filtering through nonlinear wave mixing.

Abstract

Light scattering by disordered media is a ubiquitous effect. After passing through them, the light acquires a random phase, masking or destroying associated information. Filtering this random phase is of paramount importance to many applications, such as sensing, imaging, and optical communication, to cite a few, and it is commonly achieved through computationally extensive post-processing using statistical correlation. In this work, we show that mixing noisy optical modes of various complexity in a second-order nonlinear medium can be used for efficient and straightforward filtering of a random wavefront under sum-frequency generation processes without utilizing correlation-based calculations.