Abstract
Recently the optical transmission matrix (TM) has been shown to be useful in controlling the propagation of light in highly scattering media. In this paper, we present the vector transmission matrix (VTM) which, unlike the TM, captures both the intensity and polarization transmission property of the scattering medium. We present an experimental technique for measuring the absolute values of the VTM elements which is in contrast to existing techniques whereby the TM elements are measured to within a scaling factor. The usefulness of the VTM is illustrated by showing that it can be used to both predict and control the magnitude of the complex polarization ratio of the light focused through the scattering medium. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show the possibility of controlling the polarization of the light transmitted through highly scattering media.
Highlights
The ability to control the transmission of light through a highly scattering medium (HSM) has a multitude of potential applications and has recently garnered special attention [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
To elucidate the usefulness of the vector transmission matrix (VTM) in predicting the polarization of the light focused through an HSM we carried out a series of experiments
The optimization of the intensity of the focused light was carried out without considering the polarization information contained in the VTMs
Summary
The ability to control the transmission of light through a highly scattering medium (HSM) has a multitude of potential applications and has recently garnered special attention [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Being able to control the polarization of the light transmitted thorough the HSM could extend the capabilities of polarization sensitive deep-tissue imaging techniques such as polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography [13] as well as various coherent nonlinear microscopy techniques (eg., SHG [14] and CARS [15]) It could be useful in imaging the dipole orientation of the molecules immobilized in a matrix for single molecule studies, and for the curing of polarization sensitive polymers in 3D fabrication. We generalize the concept of the TM used in the experiments controlling the light propagation through an HSM [2, 6] to take into account the polarization of optical fields resulting in the vector transmission matrix (VTM).
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