Abstract
ATRC is a new ligth scattering technique that measures by holography the field amplitude scattered by a sample, and analyze its spatial correlations. ATRC outperforms other light scattering techniques like DLS, DWS and TRC. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) [1], diffusing wave spectroscopy (DWS) [2] and time resolved correlation (TRC) [3] are well-established techniques for investigating the dynamics of a wide variety of systems in physics, chemistry, biology , and medicine. DLS and DWS consider the intensity time fluctuations of the scattered light, and study samples, whose dynamics are homogeneous in time. TRC considers the spatial fluctuations, and is able to study slow or temporally heterogeneous dynamics. We propose, in this work, to replace the TRC multi pixel detector by an holographic one, and to consider the spatial fluctuations of the field complex amplitude E as a new quantity of interest. We introduce thus a new tool called ATRC for Amplitude Time Resolved Correlation, which outperforms TRC and open new perspectives. Fig. 1. (a) TRCA typical setup. (b) Reconstructed image of a nanocomposite sample. Fig.1 (a) shows a simplified diagram of the TRCA setup. The sample S is illuminated by the laser beam L1. The light scattered by the sample is split by the beam splitter BS into two imaging paths, corresponding to cameras C1 and C2. Lens L made the image of the sample S on C1, which records the light intensity image I of S. On the other hand, the camera C2 records the interference pattern (i.e. the hologram) of the scattered light with the reference laser light L2, and the complex amplitude image E of S is calculated by holographic reconstruction. The optimize the detection sensitivity [4], holography is heterodyne [5] and off-axis. Fig.1 (b) shows the intensity reconstructed image (I = |E| 2) of a 30 × 10 mm 2 Styrene-Butadiene/Silica nanocom-posite sample, which is observed in reflection. Because 2 phase detection is used, both the +1 and-1 image of the sample are seen (right and left hand side images of Fig.1 (b)). To analyze the dynamic of the sample, TRC considers