Optics of disordered systems group

Welcome!

In our group we study the properties of scattered light, with the ultimate goal to gain control over it, and be able to perform imaging in otherwise opaque media.

Most of what we can see around us scatter light. In a sense, we can see what there is around us exactly because most of it scatters light. This scattering is due to the fact that many materials are inhomogeneous at a scale comparable with the wavelength of light. Clouds are made of water droplets a few microns wide, paint contains TiO₂ particles a few hundreds of nm wide, etc. The very reason why our own body is not transparent is because the cells we are made of contain a lot of structure at the ~100nm scale. While the fundamental Physics of light scattering is well understood, these scattering systems are complex enough to be in practice unsolvable, and to give rise to a number of emergent properties, which are still a very active field of research.

We are mostly an experimental group, focusing on the properties of visible light in disordered systems.