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Real-time wavefront shaping through scattering media by all-optical feedback


  Micha Nixon [1]  ,  Ori Katz [1]  ,  Eran Small [1]  ,  Yaron Bromberg [1]  ,  Asher Friesem [1]  ,  Yaron Silberberg [1]  ,  Nir Davidson [1]  
 [1] Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Insititute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel


Controlling light through dynamically varying heterogeneous media is a sought-after goal with important applications

ranging from free-space communication to nanosurgery. The underlying challenge is to control a large number of degrees

of freedom of the optical wavefront, at timescales shorter than the medium dynamics. Many advances have been reported

recently following the demonstration of focusing through turbid samples by wavefront shaping, where spatial light

modulators with more than 1,000 degrees of freedom were used. Unfortunately, spatial light modulator-based wavefront

shaping requires feedback from a detector or camera and is currently limited to slowly varying samples. Here, we

demonstrate a novel approach for wavefront shaping utilizing all-optical feedback. We show that the complex wavefront

required to focus light scattered by turbid samples (including thin biological tissues) can be generated at submicrosecond

timescales by the process of field self-organization inside a multimode laser cavity, without requiring electronic feedback,

spatial light modulators or phase-conjugation crystals.