Ultrashort pulse propagation and the Anderson localization

We investigate the dynamics of a 10 fs light pulse propagating in a random medium by the direct solution of the three-dimensional Maxwell equations. Our approach employs molecular dynamics to generate a distribution of spherical scatterers and a parallel finite-difference time-domain code for the vectorial wave propagation. We calculate the disorder-averaged energy velocity and the decay time of the transmitted pulse versus the localization length for an increasing refractive index. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America