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Optical Patholgy
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Electric field Monte Carlo for simulation of multiple scattering polarized light
Light multiple scattering is commonly studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The deficiency of conventional Monte Carlo methods is their lack of information about the phase of light and is not suitable for the study of coherence phenomena. A novel electric field Monte Carlo (EMC) method for simulation polarized light propagation in turbid media has recently been developed by us [12]. The EMC method is different from conventional Monte Carlo approaches. EMC simulates the propagation of the electric field directly and hence contains the complete phase of light when it propagates in a turbid medium, accrued from both scattering by particles and propagation in the medium. This makes EMC a unique Monte Carlo approach able to study phase correlation and coherence effects of multiple scattering light in a first principle way. One example is the EMC study of coherent backscattering of polarized coherent light by a turbid medium [3].


PIC

Figure 1: Backscattering Mueller matrix. All 4 × 4 matrix element are displayed as a two-dimensional image of the surface, 20ls × 20ls in size, with the laser being incident in the center and ls being the scattering length. The displayed Mueller matrix has been normalized by the maximum light intensity of the (1, 1) element.


NEW: Electric field Monte Carlo package (EMC) version 0.6 can be found here. A brief introduction to EMC is given in README.txt included in the package. Please study the example deplength.cpp included in the package carefully. This simple example demonstrates the basic usage of EMC package. Two other examples are also included which were presented in the EMC paper.

Selected Publications

[1]   M. Xu. Electric field Monte Carlo for polarized light propagation in turbid media. Opt. Express, 12:6530–6539, 2004. http://www.opticsexpress.org/abstract.cfm?URI=OPEX-12-26-6530.

[2]   Kevin G. Phillips, Min Xu, S. K. Gayen, and R. R. Alfano. Time-resolved ring structure of circularly polarized beams backscattered from forward scattering media. Opt. Express, 13:7954–7969, 2005.

[3]   John Sawicki, Nikolas Kastor, and Min Xu. Electric field Monte Carlo simulation of coherent backscattering of polarized light by a turbid medium. Opt. Express, 16:5728–5738, 2008.

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