This award covers a program which focuses on the study of light propagation in disordered materials with three distinct experimental components. (1) A low-coherence optical heterodyning technique will be used to image absorbing structure imbedded in a high-scattering medium. (2) A low-coherence photon correlation spectroscopic technique will be developed which should allow the detection of very low order scattering while suppressing the multiply scattered components. (3) A pulse-time-of-flight experiment will be implemented in order to determine the transport and absorption mean-free-path lengths needed for analysis of all the experiments. The results of this work, in addition to contributing to the elucidation of the role of scattering in imaging of dense media, have potential application in the fields of optical mammography and tomography.
