Diffuse Waves in Complex Media

The NATO Advanced Study Institute on Diffuse Waves in Complex Media was held at the "Centre de Physique des Houches" in France from March 17 to 27, 1998. The Schools' scientific content, wave propagation in heterogeneous me dia, has covered many areas of fundamental and applied research. On the one hand, the understanding of wave propagation has considerably improved during the last thirty years. New developments and concepts such as, speckle correlations, weak and strong localization, time reversal, near-field propagation are under active research. On the other hand, wave propagation in random media is now being investigated in many different fields such as applied mathematics, acoustics, optics, atomic physics, geo physics or medical sciences. Each community often uses its own langage to describe the same phenomena. The aim of the School was to gather worldwide specialists to illuminate various aspects of wave propagation in random media. This volume presents fourteen expository articles corresponding to courses and seminars given during the School. They are arranged as follows. The first three articles deal with the phenomena of localization of waves: B. van Tiggelen (p. 1) gives a critical review of the physics of localization, J. Lacroix (p. 61) presents the mathematical theory and A. Klein (p. 73) describes recent results for randomized periodic media.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Les Houches, France, March 17-27, 1998

- Localization of waves.- - Mathematical theory of localization.- - Localization of light in randomized periodic media.- - Photonic band gap materials.- - High-contrast photonic crystals.- - Photon statistics of a random laser.- - Spectra of large random matrices: a method of study.- - Optics of ordered and disordered atomic media.- - Cold atoms and multiple scattering.- - Wave scattering from rough surfaces.- - Acoustic pulses propagating in randomly layered media.- - Reflection and transmission of acoustic waves by a locally-layered random slab.- - Seismic wave diffusion in the earth lithosphere.- - Imaging and averaging in complex media.- - Subject index.