Scattering-based microscope imaging of light beams in soft birefringent media with orientational fluctuations

Thanks to their giant Kerr-like nonlinear optical response, liquid crystals support the existence of spatial optical solitons called nematicons. These solitons can be experimentally imaged in a microscope thanks to the fluctuation-induced scattering of the laser beam, but the associated microscope images are generally hard to interpret due to the incoherent nature of light scattering. In this contribution, we introduce a theoretical framework allowing to simulate microscope images originating from bulk scattering sources. We apply this framework to the visualization of bouncing solitons, and show that our framework could be the basis for a novel tomography technique of optical fields.