Taking advantage of multiple scattering to communicate with time-reversal antennas

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Jan 10;90(1):014301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.014301. Epub 2003 Jan 10.

Abstract

We present an experimental demonstration showing that, contrary to first intuition, the more scattering a mesoscopic medium is, the more information can be conveyed through it. We used a multiple input-multiple output configuration: a multichannel ultrasonic time-reversal antenna is used to transmit random series of bits simultaneously to different receivers which were only a few wavelengths apart. Whereas the transmission is free of error when multiple scattering occurs in the propagation medium, the error rate is huge in a homogeneous medium.