  Wavefront shaping (WFS) has emerged as powerful tool to control the
propagation of diverse wave phenomena (light, sound, microwaves, ...) in
disordered matter for applications including imaging, communication, energy
transfer, micromanipulation, and scattering anomalies. Nonetheless, in practice
the necessary coherent control of multiple input channels remains a vexing
problem. Here, we overcome this difficulty by doping the disordered medium with
programmable meta-atoms in order to adapt it to an imposed arbitrary incoming
wavefront. Besides lifting the need for carefully shaped incident wavefronts,
our approach also unlocks new opportunities such as sequentially achieving
different functionalities with the same arbitrary wavefront. We demonstrate our
concept experimentally for electromagnetic waves using programmable
metasurfaces in a chaotic cavity, with applications to focusing with the
generalized Wigner-Smith operator as well as coherent perfect absorption. We
expect our fundamentally new perspective on coherent wave control to facilitate
the transition of intricate WFS protocols into real applications for various
wave phenomena.

Applied Physics;Optics