Compare Different Methods of Modes Estimation of Bent Multimode Fibers with pyMMF

In a previous tutorial, I explained how to calculate the modes of a bent multimode fibers. I introduced two methods, following the approach published in [M. Plöschner, T. Tyc, and T. Čižmár, Nat. Photon. (2015)]. In this short tutorial, I show how to use pyMMF to simulate bent fibers and compare the two different methods. A Jupyter notebook can be found on my Github account: compare_bending_methods.ipynb.

Semidefinite Programming for Intensity Only Estimation of the Transmission Matrix

The possibility of measuring the transmission matrix using intensity only measurements is a much sought-after feature as it allows us not to rely on interferometry. Interferometry usually requires laboratory-grade stability difficult to obtain for real-world applications. Typically, we want to be able to retrieve the transmission matrix from a set of pairs composed of input masks and output intensity patterns. However, this problem, which corresponds to a phase-retrieval problem, is not convex, hence difficult to solve using standard techniques. The idea proposed in [I. Waldspurger et al., Math. Program (2015)] is to relax some constraints to approximate the problem to a convex one that can be solved using the semidefinite programming approach. I briefly detail the approach and provide an example of the procedure to reconstruct the transmission matrix using Python. A Jupyter notebook can be found on my Github account: semidefiniteTM_example.ipynb.

Complex-Valued Neural Networks for Physics Applications

An implementation in PyTorch

Artificial neural networks are mainly used for treating data encoded in real values, such as digitized images or sounds. In such systems, using complex-valued tensors would be quite useless. This is however different for physic related topics. When dealing with wave propagation in particular, using complex values is interesting since the physics typically has linear, hence more simple, behavior when considering complex fields. This is sometimes true even when the inputs and the outputs of the system are real values. For instance, consider a complex media that you excite using an amplitude modulator, such as a DMD (Digital Micromirror Device) and you measure the output intensity. You manipulate only real values, but if you want to characterize the system, you have to keep in mind that the phase is a hidden variable as the effect of propagation is represented by the multiplication by a complex matrix on the optical field.

The speckle-correlation transmission matrix

[K. Lee and Y. Park, Nat. Commun, 7 (2016)]

[Y. Baek, K. Lee and Y. Park, Phys. Rev. Appl., 7 (2016)]

[L. Gong, Q. Zhao, H. Zhang, X.-Y. Hu, K. Huang, J.-M. Yang and Y.-M. Li, Light Sci. Appl., 8 (2019)]

Measuring the optical phase is a ubiquitous challenge in optics. Through a linear scattering medium, one can always link the output optical field to the input one using the transmission matrix. However, one still has to measure the phase of the complex output field. In [K. Lee and Y. Park, Nat. Commun, 7 (2016)] the authors introduce a technique to reconstruct a complex optical field using a thin diffuser. Once the matrix is calibrated, only an intensity measurement is required to reconstruct the amplitude and the phase of the complex optical field.