Calculating coherent light-wave propagation in large heterogeneous media
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1812.10463,
title = {Calculating coherent light-wave propagation in large heterogeneous media},
author = {Tom Vettenburg and Simon A. R. Horsley and J. Bertolotti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.10463},
year = {2019}
}