Dominated binary phase distribution governed by information theory in noisy scattering systems

Abstract

Optical phase with continuously distributed values is always expected to exhibit higher efficiency in the diffraction dominated operation. However, in noisy scattering systems, this assertion does not hold. We found that the optimized optical phase distribution forming the focus behind the scattering media tends to exhibit a binary configuration. We show that this is the direct corollary of the Shannon theorem when applied to the scattering process. The binary distribution holds the advantage of speeding up the optimization processing, which might make it possible to image through dynamic scattering media such as biological images.