Scattering correlations of time-gated light

Manipulating the propagation of light through scattering media remains a major challenge for many applications, inducting astronomy, biomedical imaging, and colloidal optics. Light can be focused through inhomogeneous media into any desired point with wavefront shaping techniques. However, scattering correlations, referred to as the optical memory effect, limit spatial range within the scattering medium, where a single wavefront correction remains accurate. Selecting only the weakly scattered light is a promising way to increase this correlation range. Here we investigate spatial scattering correlations by digitally time-gating the early arriving light in the spectral domain. We demonstrate that the range of the translational memory effect for the early arriving light is increased almost fourfold, paving the way for a range of scattering media imaging applications. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement