Light backscattering polarization patterns from turbid media: theory and experiment

摘要

We present both experimental measurements and Monte-Carlo-based simulations of the diffusely back-scattered intensity patterns that arise from illuminating a turbid medium with a polarized laser beam. It is rigorously shown that, because of axial symmetry of the system,, only seven elements of the effective backscattering Mueller matrix are independent, A new numerical method that allows simultaneous calculation of all 16 elements of the two-dimensional Mueller matrix is used. To validate our method we compared calculations to measurements from a turbid medium that consisted of polystyrene spheres of different sizes and concentrations in deionized water. The experimental and numerical results are in excellent agreement. O 1999 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 260,5436, 290.1350, 290.4210, 290.7050.