Diffuse reflection and transmission of light by a medium with an arbitraryscattering indicatrix

The diffuse reflection and transmission of light by a plane-parallel medium is considered, taking into account only the azimuth-independent part of th e scattering indicatrix. The scattering indicatrix is expressed in terms of an expansion in an arbitrary number of Legendre polynomials. Two approache s to the problem are analyzed using Sobolev's theory. Two systems of linear algebraic equations for the coefficients of the auxiliary polynomials qi(m u) and s(i)(mu) are derived and compared. It is shown that one of these app roaches is less preferable, since it is not valid for conservative scatteri ng. (C) 2000 MAIK "Nauka/Interperiodica".