Recent Progress in Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Hard and Soft Solids

A variety of imaging applications require increasingly bright illumination sources. Conventional thermal light sources (light bulbs) are being replaced by light emitting diodes (LEDs), superluminescent diodes (SLDs) and lasers. Unfortunately the spatial coherence of light from SLDs and lasers leads to speckle noise that distorts images. Such image corruption limits the general use of lasers in applications ranging from modern microscopy to digital light projectors to optical radar. We recently demonstrated that random lasers can have low spatial coherence while maintaining high intensities. Here, we show that random laser illumination can indeed eliminate coherent artifacts and generate speckle-free images. This work is done in collaboration with Prof. Michael Choma of Yale Medical School.