Romain Bachelard

Anderson localization of 3D light has eluded definitive experimental proofs for many years, both for technical and fundamental reasons. Apart from the difficulty of producing highly scattering samples, a major challenge is identifying an unambiguous signature of the phase transition in experimentally feasible situations. We here discuss the correspondence between the collapse of the conductance, the increase in intensity fluctuations at the localization transition and the Ioffe-Regel criterion, thus connecting the macroscopic and microscopic approaches of localization. Intensity fluctuations thus appear as a proper signature to study the localization transition in 3D.