2005/08/22 by Hariharan Subramanian, Prabhakar Pradhan, Subramanian, Hariharan +9
Engineering · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy Techniques #Optical Polarization and Ellipsometry #Random lasers and scattering media #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0508538
10 pages, 10 figures
openalex publication_date 2005/08/22 · arxiv created 2005/09/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Constructive interference among coherent waves traveling time-reversed paths in a random medium gives rise to the enhancement of light scattering observed in directions close to backscattering. This phenomenon is known as enhanced backscattering (EBS). According to diffusion theory, the angular width of an EBS cone is proportional to the ratio of the wavelength of light λ to the transport mean free path length ls* of a random medium. In biological media, large ls* ~ 0.5-2 mm >> λ results in an extremely small (~0.001 ^°) angular width of the EBS cone making the experimental observation of such narrow peaks difficult. Recently, the feasibility of observing EBS under low spatial coherence illumination (spatial coherence length Lsc<