The Depolarization Performances of the Polarized Light in Different Scattering Media Systems

In this paper, with the aids of the Monte Carlo simulations, we have investigated the depolarization performances of circularly polarized light (CPL) and linearly polarized light (LPL) transmitted in homogeneous scattering media systems. The depolarization performances depend on the number density, refractive index, and the concrete size distributions of scattering particles. Here, we mainly investigate the mixed ratio and distribution effect of scattering particles on the depolarization performances of CPL and LPL, respectively. The simulation results show that there exist larger mismatches in the depolarization performances between monodisperse and polydisperse scattering systems, and with increasing small particles' proportion the degree of linear polarization decreases slightly, but the degree of circular polarization decreases drastically. When the size distribution of scattering particles obey the logarithmic normal distribution, the simulated results show that the propagation behavior of the incident light in a polydisperse medium system with standard deviation of σ = 0.1 μm can be modeled very well by the corresponding monodisperse medium system with the mean value, however, the approximation will fail for a scattering medium with larger standard deviation of σ = 0.5 μm. These results demonstrated that the depolarization behavior of light was sensitive to the mixed ratio or the distribution state of particles, which was significant to the polarization engineering, such as polarization imaging and polarization based communications.