October 2019
Spotlight Summary by Roarke Horstmeyer
Nonlinear optical memory effect
Wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to directly visualize what was going on deep inside of our bodies at cellular resolution? While there has been a huge amount of research and development surrounding this effort, it is not surprisingly quite a challenge. When light enters our tissue, it quickly begins to scatter, which prevents us from forming clear, high-resolution images more than a millimeter or two beneath the skin’s surface. One promising tool that can overcome this barrier is a technique termed wavefront shaping—an experimental method that can compensate for scattering’s deleterious effects. Unfortunately, the extent over which wavefront shaping is helpful, termed the optical memory effect, is extremely small, meaning that any images that we hope to form deep within tissue can only cover a relatively limited area. In this work, Fleming and colleagues present a new twist to the memory effect problem, showing that it is possible to manipulate the memory effect using nonlinear opto-thermal properties of the scattering medium itself. This interesting insight suggests a new degree of freedom that may help us extend our control over light deep within various scattering materials, and potentially push our ability to form high-resolution images deeper into living tissue.
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Article Information
Nonlinear optical memory effect
A. Fleming, C. Conti, T. Vettenburg, and A. Di Falco
Opt. Lett. 44(19) 4841-4844 (2019) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF