Crossover from renormalized to conventional diffusion near the 3D Anderson localization transition for light

Abstract

We report on anomalous light transport in the strong scattering regime. Using low-coherence interferometry, we measure the reflection matrix of titanium dioxide powders, revealing crucial features of strong optical scattering which can not be observed with transmission measurements: (i) a subdiffusive regime of transport at early times of flight that is a direct consequence of predominant recurrent scattering loops, and (ii) a crossover to a conventional, but extremely slow, diffusive regime at long times. These observations support previous predictions that near-field coupling between scatterers prohibits Anderson localization of light in three-dimensional disordered media.

13 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Anderson Transitions
• Full transmission and reflection of waves propagating through a maze of disorder
• Cooperative effects and disorder: A scaling analysis of the spectrum of the effective atomic Hamiltonian
• Retrieving time-dependent Green's functions in optics with low-coherence interferometry

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Sub-diffusive wave transport and weak localization transition in three-dimensional stealthy hyperuniform disordered systems