Speckle statistics of coherent waves in disordered media

Anton Andreev
UW Physics

When a coherent wave propagates through a disordered elastically scattering medium its intensity exhibits random spatial fluctuations knowns known as speckles. I will present a Boltzmann-Langevin approach to speckle statistics and discuss its applications to specific cases. The results for directed waves differ substantially from those previously known in the literature. Among the differences are slow power law decay and sign change of spatial intensity correlations.  In the talk I will focus on the qualitative discussion of the essential physics that underlies the approach.