POLARIZATION EFFECTS IN ELECTROMAGNETIC-WAVE PROPAGATION IN A 2-DIMENSIONAL DISORDERED SYSTEM

Multiple scattering of electromagnetic waves in diffusive media presen ts serious challenges to theoretical description. Rayleigh scattering by single impurities is anisotropic and also mixes the two available t ransverse polarization states. In a disordered system that retains tra nslational invariance in one direction the polarizations are decoupled for propagation in the plane normal to this direction. An example wou ld be a stack of cylinders with random dielectric constants. One polar ization has an isotropic scattering cross-section, and the other an an isotropic scattering cross-section, allowing the study of anisotropic scattering without polarization mixing. We describe the multiple scatt ering using generalized transfer matrices. This allows us to calculate the average reflected intensity profiles, the diffusive intensity tra nsmission and the coherent back-scattered peak. All three quantities s how polarization effects.