VECTOR STATISTICS OF MULTIPLY SCATTERED WAVES IN RANDOM-SYSTEMS

Statistical distribution functions are derived for the polarization of optical waves transmitted through a random medium. Excellent agreement is obtained with experiment. Our most significant result is the distribution function for the ellipticity-epsilon, the ratio between the major and minor axes of the elliptically polarized scattered light. This has a maximum at epsilon = 0 and vanishes for epsilon = 1, indicating that linear polarization is the most probable state and that circular polarization has vanishing probability. The averaged ellipticity is found to be <epsilon> = 1 - ln2 = 0.307.