Reflection statistics of weakly disordered optical medium when its mean refractive index is different from an outside medium

• Main Authors: Pradhan, Prabhakar, Park, Daniel John, Capoglu, Ilker, Subramanian, Hariharan, Damania, Dhwanil, Cherkezyan, Lusik, Taflove, Allen, Backman, Vadim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 28.12.2015
• Subjects: Physics - Optics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1512.08432

Based on the difference between mean background of an optical sample refractive index n_0 and an outside medium, n_out, different than n_0, we study the reflection statistics of a one-dimensional weakly disordered optical medium with refractive index n(x)=n_0+dn(x). Considering dn(x) as color noise with the exponential spatial correlation decay length l_c and k as the incident wave vector, our results show that for the small correlation length limit, i.e. k*l_c<1, the average value of reflectance, r, follows a form that is similar to that of the matched refractive-index case n_0=n_out, i.e., <r(dn, lc)> proportional to <dn^2>l_c. However, the standard deviation of r is proven to be std(r(dn,l_c)) proportional to sqrt(<dn^2>l_c), which is different from the matched case. Applications to light scattering from layered media and biological cells are discussed