Coherent light with maximal-symmetry statistics: a high-sensitivity random interferometer

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• Francois Amblard, Ulsan National Institute for Science and Technology, South Korea
• Tuesday 26 November 2019, 11:00-12:15
• Theory Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mark Dennis.

Tremendous progress has been made for the description of the statistical geometry and topology of waves, and the understanding of disordered light in particular. Experimentally however, the disorder of the optical field has only been produced so far by the local interaction with a random medium. In free space, we constructed a highly disordered optical field by injecting a single frequency light into a “perfectly” white Lambertian closed box. The resulting optical field is the coherent superposition of a very large number of plane waves, produced by a maximal-symmetry probability distribution: rotation and translation invariance, uniform distribution on the Poincare sphere, and uniformly distributed phases. The resulting 3D speckle intensity pattern exhibits an extreme sensitivity to phase fluctuations. The measurement of intensity fluctuations over a wide frequency range (10-2-108 Hz) provides the basis of a so-called random interferometry. I will demonstrate the possibility to detect pico-meter cavity deformations, thermal capillary waves, very slow dielectric fluctuations in liquids, or to amplify light scattering. A range of applications can be envisioned for soft matter physics and new optical sensors. Our isotropic and homogeneous light box may also help the exploration of interesting quantum-like and topological properties light disorder in free space.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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