Correlation-Enhanced Control of Transmission Through Disordered Media

By controlling the many degrees of freedom in the incident wavefront, one can manipulate wave propagation in complex structures and violate the typical properties of diffusion. With optical wavefront shaping experiments on strongly scattering ZnO powders and random matrix theories, we show that long-range correlations in the coherent diffusion enable a wide range of control on non-local transport properties. The correlation effects emerge when the target consists of more channels than the effective dimensionless conductance g of the sample. Spectrally, long-range correlations reduce the spectral degrees of freedom and enable the broadband control of light.