There has been a growing interest in disordered optical media in recent years due to their potential applications in solar collectors, random lasers, light confinement, and other advanced photonic functions. This paper studies the transport of light for different incidence angles in a strongly disordered optical medium composed of core-shell TiO2@Silica nanoparticles suspended in an ethanol solution. A decrease of optical conductance and an increase of absorption near the input border are reported when the incidence angle increases. The specular reflection, measured for the photons that enter the sample, is lower than the effective internal reflection undergone by the coherently backscattered photons in the exact opposite direction, indicating a nonreciprocal propagation of light. This study represents a novel approach in order to understand the complex physics involved at the phase transition to localization.

We demonstrate the generation of non-classical photon pairs in a warm Rb87 atomic vapor cell with no buffer gas or polarization preserving coatings via spontaneous four-wave mixing. We obtain the photon pairs with a 1/e correlation time of 40 ns and the violation of Cauchy–Schwartz inequality by a factor of 23±3. This provides a convenient and efficient method to generate photon pair sources based on an atomic ensemble.

The measurement of the second-order degree of coherence [g(2)(τ)] is one of the important methods used to study the dynamical evolution of photon-matter interaction systems. Here, we use a nitrogen-vacancy center in a diamond to compare the measurement of g(2)(τ) with two methods. One is the prototype measurement process with a tunable delay. The other is a start-stop process based on the time-to-amplitude conversion (TAC) and multichannel analyzer (MCA) system, which is usually applied to achieve efficient measurements. The divergence in the measurement results is observed when the delay time is comparable with the mean interval time between two neighboring detected photons. Moreover, a correction function is presented to correct the results from the TAC-MCA system to the genuine g(2)(τ). Such a correction method will provide a way to study the dynamics in photonic systems for quantum information techniques.

We model the effects of weak fluctuations on the probability densities and normalized powers of vortex models for the Bessel–Gauss photon beam with fractional topological charge in the paraxial non-Kolmogorov turbulence channel. We find that probability density of signal vortex models is a function of deviation from the center of the photon beam, and the farther away from the beam center it is, the smaller the probability density is. For fractional topological charge, the average probability densities of signal/crosstalk vortex modes oscillate along the beam radius except the half-integer order. As the beam waist of the photon source grows, the average probability density of signal and crosstalk vortex modes grow together. Moreover, the peak of the average probability density of crosstalk vortex modes shifts outward from the beam center as the beam waist gets larger. The results also show that the smaller index of non-Kolmogorov turbulence and the smaller generalized refractive-index structure parameter may lead to the higher average probability densities of signal vortex modes and lower average probability densities of crosstalk vortex modes. Lower-coherence radius or beam waist can give rise to less reduction of the normalized powers of the signal vortex modes, which is opposite to the normalized powers of crosstalk vortex modes.Physics (Grant No. 11447174), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JUSRP51517).