E-book
Digital Version
Pattelli, Lorenzo

Imaging light transport at the femtosecond scale : a walk on the wild side of diffusion

2018 - Firenze University Press

149 p.

  • Includes bibliographical references.
  • Paper, milk, clouds and white paint share a common property: they are opaque disordered media through which light scatters randomly rather than propagating in a straight path. For very thick and turbid media, indeed, light eventually propagates in a ‘diffusive' way, i.e. similarly to how tea infuses through hot water. Frequently though, a material is neither perfectly opaque nor transparent and the simple diffusion model does not hold. In this work, we developed a novel optical-gating setup that allowed us to observe light transport in scattering media with sub-ps time resolution. An array of unexplored aspects of light propagation emerged from this spatio-temporal description, unveiling transport regimes that were previously inaccessibile due to the extreme time scales involved and the lack of analytical models.
  • Lorenzo Pattelligraduated with a Master's degree in Physics in 2013 at the University of Florence and received his Ph.D. in 2017 for his work in the Optics of Complex Systems group at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy. His main research interests are in the field of light transport in disordered media, which he studies in many different samples, ranging from beetles and butterfly wings to more exotic photonic structures such as Lévy glasses. [Publisher's text]