Experimentally measuring extreme value statistics of photon diffusion

Particles undergoing diffusive motion have classically been modeled as undergoing individual, independent random walks. In many cases, however, particles near each other should be influenced by their shared environment and move in similar, correlated ways. As revealed by theoretical and numerical work, the extreme value statistics, i.e. the distributions of outlier particle positions and first passage times, are thus different from the predictions made by the classical diffusion model. We measure the distributions of the extreme first passage times due to the random environment, by sending ultra-fast bursts of photons through a space-time random scattering medium and timing the arrivals of the first passage photons. We report on experimental design as well as measurements of the statistics of extreme first passage photons.