University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Department of Physics Papers Department of Physics 8-1-1994 Influence of Boundary Reflection and Refraction on Diffusive Photon Transport Douglas J. Durian University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/physics_papers Part of the Physics Commons Recommended Citation Durian, D. J. (1994). Influence of Boundary Reflection and Refraction on Diffusive Photon Transport. Physical Review E, 50 (2), 857-866. http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.50.857 At the time of publication, author Douglas J. Durian was affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, he is a faculty member at the Physics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/physics_papers/631 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Influence of Boundary Reflection and Refraction on Diffusive Photon Transport Abstract We report computer simulations which test the accuracy of the diffusion theories used in the analysis of multiple light scattering data. Explicitly including scattering anisotropy and boundary reflections, we find that the predicted probability for transmission through a slab is accurate to 1% if the slab thickness is greater than about 5 transport mean free paths. For strictly isotropic scattering and no boundary reflections, the exact diffusion theory prediction is accurate to this level for all thicknesses. In addition, we predict how the angular distribution of transmitted photons is affected by boundary reflectivity, both with and without refraction. Simulations show that, to a similar extent, corrections to diffusion theory from a more general transport theory are not needed here, either.