Maximum control of light propagation through turbid media in the presence of noise

It is well known that the propagation of light is scrambled while passing through a complex nanophotonic material with spatial inhomogeneities in the refractive index such as white paint, paper or biological tissue. Therefore, it is impossible to focus light through such media using conventional optics. Recently, it has been shown that light can be focused through a turbid medium using wavefront shaping, which controls a large number of degrees of freedom of the input field [1,2]. The amount of control in wavefront shaping is quantified by the enhancement factor. The enhancement factor is the ratio of the light intensity of the focus after the optimization to the ensemble average intensity of the light in the same position before the optimization [3]. In ideal conditions, the enhancement is proportional to the number of degrees of freedom. However, there are practical factors that limit the enhancement such as noise [3,4]