Shaping the Wavefront of Incident Light with a Strong Robustness Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

We demonstrate a modified particle swarm optimization(PSO) algorithm to effectively shape the incident light with strong robustness and short optimization time. The performance of the modified PSO algorithm and genetic algorithm(GA) is numerically simulated. Then, using a high speed digital micromirror device, we carry out light focusing experiments with the modified PSO algorithm and GA. The experimental results show that the modified PSO algorithm has greater robustness and faster convergence speed than GA. This modified PSO algorithm has great application prospects in optical focusing and imaging inside in vivo biological tissue, which possesses a complicated background.

Controlling the light wavefront through a scattering medium based on direct digital frequency synthesis technology

Phase modulation is a crucial step when the frequency-based wavefront optimization technique is exploited to measure the optical transmission matrix(TM) of a scattering medium. We report a simple but powerful method, direct digital frequency synthesis(DDS) technology to modulate the phase front of the laser and measure the TM. By judiciously modulating the phase front of a He–Ne laser beam, we experimentally generate a high quality focus at any targeted location through a 2 mm thick 120 grit ground glass diffuser, which is commercially used in laser display and laser holographic display for improving brightness uniformity and reducing speckle. The signal to noise ratio(SNR) of the clear round focus is 50 and the size is about 44 μm. Our study will open up new avenues for enhancing light energy delivery to the optical engine in laser TV to lower the power consumption, phase compensation to reduce the speckle noise, and controlling the lasing threshold in random lasers.

Fast optical wavefront engineering for controlling light propagation in dynamic turbid media

While propagating inside the strongly scattering biological tssue,photons lose their incident directions beyond one transport mean free path(TMFP,~1 millimeter(mm)),which makes it challenging to achieve optical focusing or clear imaging deep inside tissue.By manipulating many degrees of the incident optical wavefront,the latest optical wavefront engineering(WFE)technology compensates the wavelfront distortions caused by the scattering media and thus is toward breaking this physical limit,bringing bright perspective to many applications deep inside tissue,eg,high resolution functional/molecular imaging,optical excitation(optogenetics)and optical tweezers.However,inside the dynamic turbid media such as the biological tissue,the wavefront distortion is a fast and continuously changing process whose decorrelation rate is on timescales from milliseconds(ms)to microseconds(μs),or even faster.This requires that the WFE technology should be capable of beating this rapid process.In this review,we discuss the major challenges faced by the WFE technology due to the fast decorrelation of dynamic turbid media such as living tissue when achieving light focusing/imaging and summarize the research progress achieved to date to overcome these challenges.