Target behind a disordered medium

Optimal information about the invisible

Together with Dorian Bouchet and Allard Mosk from the Nanophotonics group at Utrecht University, we demonstrated how to shape the wave-front of a coherent laser beam such as to obtain with it the maximal possible information about a target hidden behind or inside a disordered medium. Our joint work was published in Nature Physics and is described in the following press release compiled by Florian Aigner from the press office at TU Wien (see also highlight in Physics World).

Adaptive control of quantum cascade random lasers

Together with the THz lab at TU Wien we show in a new Nature Communication that quantum cascade random lasers can be adaptively controlled by a suitably shaped infrared beam. Following a control strategy developed by Nicolas Bachelard, an initially multi-mode THz random laser is turned into a tunable single-mode source. Discussions of our work can be found at the Austrian Press Agency, Chemie.de and at Analytica News.

Optimal wave fields for micro-manipulation in complex scattering environments

A new paper with our collaborators in Nice and London just appeared in Nature Photonics and is highlighted in OSA Optics & Photonics News and in Pro-Physik. In this work we demonstrate how to design the optimal wave front to deliver the highest possible force or torque onto a target embedded in a complex environment (see illustration on the left for a wave field transferring a strong torque onto a square target).