• DOI:10.1364/OE.27.011946
• Corpus ID: 119105761

Calculating coherent light-wave propagation in large heterogeneous media.

@article{Vettenburg2018CalculatingCL,
  title={Calculating coherent light-wave propagation in large heterogeneous media.},
  author={Tom Vettenburg and Simon A. R. Horsley and Jacopo Bertolotti},
  journal={Optics express},
  year={2018},
  volume={27 9},
  pages={
          11946-11967
        }
}

• T. Vettenburg, S. Horsley, J. Bertolotti
• Published 26 December 2018
• Physics
• Optics express

Understanding the interaction of light with a highly scattering material is essential for optical microscopy of optically thick and heterogeneous biological tissues. Ensemble-averaged analytic solutions cannot provide more than general predictions for relatively simple cases. Yet, biological tissues contain chiral organic molecules and many of the cells' structures are birefringent, a property exploited by polarization microscopy for label-free imaging. Solving Maxwell's equations in such materials is a notoriously hard problem. Here we present an efficient method to determine the propagation of electro-magnetic waves in arbitrary anisotropic materials. We demonstrate how the algorithm enables large scale calculations of the scattered light field in complex birefringent materials, chiral media, and even materials with a negative refractive index.