Time-reversal focusing of ultrashort pulses through thin scattering media

Abstract

When ultrashort pulses propagate through a disordered medium, scattering occurs and the intensity of the ballistic component decreases drastically. This limits the applicability of time-resolved nonlinear optical spectroscopy and microscopy. The wavefront shaping technique makes it possible to focus light through the scattering medium; however, complete time-reversal of the ultrashort pulses (as short as 10 fs) is still a very challenging problem. This is due to the in-depth characterization and precise control needed for such pulses in the time domain in order to compress down the Fourier-transform limit. In this work, we develop new spatiotemporal wavefront shaping techniques to focus ultrashort pulses at the target position through a thin scattering medium. Compared to other studies, one significant advantage of this method is that most of the characterization of the spectrally-resolved transmission matrix and temporal profile of the ultrashort pulses can be done using single-beam geometry. An interferometer with external reference is necessary to measure the difference of the phase profile between the focused and reference pulses. Furthermore, the number of controllable phase components in the spectral domain is not limited by the spectral correlations of the speckle patterns because we used a pulse shaper in the time domain to optimize the temporal properties of the ultrashort focused pulse. Our new method provides increased flexibility and precise control for manipulating extremely ultrashort pulses through thin scattering media in order to achieve time-reversal focusing at the target position.