Investigation of the temporal spread of an ultrashort light pulse on transmission through a highly scattering medium.

An experimental and theoretical investigation of the temporal spread of an ultrashort light pulse on transmission through a highly scattering medium has been made. For the strongly diffuse light, the transmitted pulse may be described by a universal function whose duration can be directly related to the width of the sample. For sufficiently scattering samples, experimental data and the diffusion approximation indicate that the output pulse duration scales with the square root of the sample width.