Statistics of diffusive and localized fields in the vortex core.

The statistics of the field structure in the vortex core surrounding phase singularities in random wave fields are measured and calculated for diffusive and localized waves. Excellent agreement is found between experiment and theory. The variation of phase with the geometric angle is deterministic, depending only upon the eccentricity of elliptical intensity contours, epsilon, whose probability distribution is shown to be universal. The distribution of vorticity is shown to reflect both the vorticity distributions within a Gaussian random wave field with a given value of the total transmission and the mesoscopic distribution of total transmission.