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Updated: May 27, 2026

Digital Inline Holographic Microscopy (DIHM) of Weakly-scattering Subjects
Published on: February 8, 2014
Hidden black: coherent enhancement of absorption in strongly scattering media
1Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA. yidong.chong@yale.edu
Abstract:
We show that a weakly absorbing, strongly scattering (white) medium can be made very strongly absorbing at any frequency within its strong-scattering bandwidth by optimizing the input electromagnetic field. For uniform absorption, results from random matrix theory imply that the reflectivity of the medium can be suppressed by a factor ∼(ℓ(a)/ℓ)N(-2), where N is the number of incident channels and ℓ, ℓ(a) are the elastic and absorption mean free paths, respectively. It is thus possible to increase absorption from a few percent to >99%. For a localized weak absorber buried in a nonabsorbing scattering medium, we find a large but bounded enhancement.
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