Abstract

We report on the experimental observation of weak and strong transverse localization in an optically induced disordered (2+1)-dimensional photonic structure. Our flexible method of nonlinear photorefractive induction is applied with a nondiffracting random intensity distribution. We focus on the analysis of a statistical output distribution for many probe events both in real and Fourier space with variance of the incoming beam’s transverse spatial frequency. Besides Anderson localization, we find evidence of transverse coherent backscattering for particular spatial frequencies.

We present observation and analysis of universal wave localization effects, Anderson localization and, for the first time, coherent backscattering in photonic random potential ensembles where naturally particular constructive interference contributions survive against statistical speckle background.

© 2015 Optical Society of America