Disorder-induced high-quality wavefront in an Anderson localizing optical fiber

High-quality coherent wavefronts are extremely useful in optical communications and lasers. Transverse Anderson Localizing Optical Fibers (TALOFs) possess a multitude of strongly localized modes that are perfectly isolated from their surroundings and can behave similarly to a single-mode light transmitting channel in a disordered matrix. Here we show that exciting a localized mode in a glass-TALOF results in a high-quality wavefront. Our analysis reveals that a majority of the guided modes in glass-TALOF have M^2~1 values. These high-quality modes are distributed across the transverse profile of the disordered fiber and can be excited easily without requiring sophisticated spatial light modulations at the input facet. A localized mode is also used in a Young double-slit experiment and a high visibility interference fringe is observed which resembles the spatial coherence from single-mode fibers.