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The physics of shear waves traveling through matter carries fundamental insights into its structure, for instance, quantifying stiffness for disease characterization. However, the origin of shear wave attenuation in tissue is currently not properly understood. Attenuation is caused by two phenomena: absorption due to energy dissipation and scattering on structures such as vessels fundamentally tied to the material's microstructure. Here, we present a scattering theory in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging, which enables the unraveling of a material's innate constitutive and scattering characteristics. By overcoming a three-order-of-magnitude scale difference between wavelength and average intervessel distance, we provide noninvasively a macroscopic measure of vascular architecture. The validity of the theory is demonstrated through simulations, phantoms, in vivo mice, and human experiments and compared against histology as gold standard. Our approach expands the field of imaging by using the dispersion properties of shear waves as macroscopic observable proxies for deciphering the underlying ultrastructures.

We present a theory for wave scintillation in the situation of a time-dependent partially coherent source and a time-dependent randomly heterogeneous medium. Our objective is to understand how the scintillation index of the measured intensity depends on the source and medium parameters. We deduce from an asymptotic analysis of the random wave equation a general form of the scintillation index, and we evaluate this in various scaling regimes. The scintillation index is a fundamental quantity that is used to analyze and optimize imaging and communication schemes. Our results are useful to quantify the scintillation index under realistic propagation scenarios and to address such optimization challenges.

A central question in free-space optical communications is how to improve the transfer of information between a transmitter and a receiver. The capacity of the communication channel can be increased by multiplexing of independent modes using either: (1) the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) approach, where communication is done with modes obtained from the singular value decomposition of the transfer matrix from the transmitter array to the receiver array, or (2) the orbital angular momentum (OAM) approach, which uses vortex beams that carry angular momenta. In both cases, the number of usable modes is limited by the finite aperture of the transmitter and receiver, and the effect of the turbulent atmosphere. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, we show that the MIMO and OAM multiplexing schemes are closely related. Specifically, in the case of circular apertures, the leading singular vectors of the transfer matrix, which are useful for communication, are essentially the same as the commonly used Laguerre-Gauss vortex beams, provided these have a special radius that depends on the wavelength, the distance from the transmitter to the receiver, and the ratio of the radii of their apertures. Second, we characterize the effect of atmospheric turbulence on the communication modes using the phase screen method put in the mathematical framework of beam propagation in random media.

Resolution analysis for imaging in the presence of noise is presented. A simple definition of resolution that takes into account the effect of noise is introduced and is shown to depend also on factors such as the signal-to-noise ratio and the false-alarm rate. The striking effect of aperture-independent superresolution in imaging with broadband signals is demonstrated.