Polarized light transport in anisotropic media composed of ellipsoids: Influence of structural anisotropy

Abstract In this study, the propagation of polarized light in anisotropic media composed of prolate ellipsoids oriented in the same direction is investigated. We proposed a DDA-Monte Carlo combined algorithm to solve the radiative transfer problem. By comparisons of backscattering two-dimensional images of Mueller matrix, the results show that, the changing information of aspect ratio and orientation of ellipsoidal scatterers can be well encoded in image-based Mueller matrix. Moreover, the effect of aspect ratio and orientation on diattenuation, retardance, depolarization and linear retardance are demonstrated by decomposing the Mueller matrix. Furthermore, the impact of aspect ratio on the rate of depolarization of linearly and circularly polarized light with optical thickness has been construed. This study has proved that structural anisotropy decelerates the depolarization rate of scattering light and traditional diffusion theory cannot be used to solve polarized light transport in anisotropic media. Our study can promote a further research on the physics of radiative transfer in anisotropic media.