Spectral and temporal speckle field measurements of a random medium

The zero-mean circular complex Gaussian field statistics of a random medium are experimentally demonstrated in the optical domain, thus verifying this key assumption of statistical optics. Using a frequency-tunable laser source in a fixed-path-length interferometer, we obtain optical field fluctuations in the time and frequency domains that clearly show that the ensemble-averaged temporal intensity converges to the photon transit time distribution, which for the samples used is in excellent agreement with a diffusion model.