Phys.org January 25, 2021
If the laser beam is deflected, scattered, and refracted, often it impossible to obtain useful data from the measurement. According to an international team of researchers (the Netherlands, Austria) if you know exactly what the disturbing environment is doing to the light beam, you can reverse the situation: Then it is possible to create a complicated wave pattern instead of the simple, straight laser beam, which gets transformed into exactly the desired shape due to the disturbances and hits right where it can deliver the best result. It is enough to first send a set of trial waves through the system to study how they are changed by the system. They developed a mathematical procedure that can be used to calculate the optimal wave from this test data. They showed that for various measurements there are certain waves that deliver a maximum of information as, e.g., on the spatial coordinates at which a certain object is located. They experimentally confirmed this with precision in the nano-meter range. They carried out further measurements to test the limits of their novel method. Possible areas of application for this new technology include microbiology but also the production of computer chips, where extremely precise measurements are indispensable…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Characteristics of maximum information states. Credit: Nature Physics (2021)