Near-field short range correlation in optical waves transmitted through random media

Two-dimensional near-field images of light transmitted through a disordered dielectric structure have been measured for two probe wavelengths. From these data, the 2D spatial dependence of the intensity correlation function, C(deltaR-->), has been extracted. We observe that the spatial dependence of C is dominated by a rapidly varying feature determined by the wavelength of the probe light and the average refractive index of the material, as expected by theory. Finally, we deduce the absolute value of the effective refractive index by fitting the theoretical spatial dependence of C to our experimental results.