Brillouin imaging in turbid samples: the removal of multiple scattering contribution

Abstract

We provide a new analytic expression and an innovative experimental method to isolate the effect of multiple scattering (MS) in Brillouin investigation of highly turbid media. On the one hand, an analytic model is given to describe the spectrum in case of ill-defined exchanged wave-vector. On the other hand, a new experimental method, named Polarization Gated Brillouin Spectroscopy (PG-BS), is proposed for selecting the MS contribution through light polarization. Both experimental and analytic methods are tested against a benchmark material, milk, demonstrating their capability to extract reliable micro-mechanical parameters even in highly turbid materials till now inaccessible to in-depth Brillouin scattering investigation.