THE INTENSITY AND STATE OF POLARIZATION OF LIGHT SCATTERED IN A SPHERICAL-SHELL

The iterative method developed earlier by the author to calculate anisotropic light scattering in an isotropically illuminated spherical shell is extended to the treatment of polarized light. The Stokes vectors and relevant matrices are expanded in Fourier series in azimuth angle phi. It is shown that only the terms with m = 0 (azimuth independent terms) and m = 2 (terms containing 2 phi) are different from zero. For the coefficients in the Fourier expansion with m = 0 the full method making alternate use of the moment equation and the equation for the source function was employed. For m = 2 no use can be made of the moment equation. In these cases, however, due to the generally low effective albedo at this m-value the source function can be found relatively easily as a sum over orders of scattering. We tested our iterative method for a shell illuminated by a central point source.