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Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2003 Mar;67(3):036621. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.67.036621. Epub 2003 Mar 26.

Information transfer through disordered media by diffuse waves.

Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics

S E Skipetrov

Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de Physique et Modélisation des Milieux Condensés, CNRS, 38042 Grenoble, France. [email protected]

PMID: 12689193 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.67.036621

Abstract

We consider the information content h of a scalar multiple-scattered, diffuse wave field psi(r) and the information capacity C of a communication channel that employs diffuse waves to transfer the information through a disordered medium. Both h and C are shown to be directly related to the mesoscopic correlations between the values of psi(r) at different positions r in space, arising due to the coherent nature of the wave. For the particular case of a communication channel between two identical linear arrays of n>>1 equally spaced transmitters or receivers (receiver spacing a), we show that the average capacity proportional, variant n and obtain explicit analytic expressions for /n in the limit of n--> infinity and kl--> infinity, where k=2pi/lambda, lambda is the wavelength, and l is the mean free path. Modification of the above results in the case of finite but large n and kl is discussed as well. If the signal to noise ratio S/N exceeds some critical value (S/N)(c), /n is a nonmonotonic function of a, exhibiting maxima at ka=mpi (m=1,2, em leader ). For smaller S/N, ka=mpi correspond to local minima, while the absolute maximum of /n is reached at some ka approximately (S/N)(1/2)(max) as maximized over the receiver spacing a and the optimal normalized receiver spacing (ka)(opt) as the spacing maximizing . Both (max)/n and (ka)(opt) scale as (S/N)(1/2) for S/N<(S/N)(c), while (ka)(opt)=mpi and (max)/n approximately log(S/N) for S/N>(S/N)(c).

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