Effect of scattering and absorbing inclusions in dispersive medium on the optical parameters of an elementary volume

Abstract

A problem of the relationship of phenomenological optical parameters of dispersive medium that contains inclusions with arbitrary shape and the parameters of such inclusions is theoretically solved in the approximation of 1D scattering phase function. It is demonstrated that the desired relationships can be represented in terms of several correction coefficients. In the presence of local inclusions, the scattering and absorption coefficients of the medium generally decrease relative to the corresponding coefficients of the uniform spatial distribution of the same amount of the dispersive material. Under certain conditions, an increase in the forward scattering of the medium with an increase in the size of inclusions can be obtained. Physical reasons for such a behavior of the phenomenological parameters are discussed, and analytical expressions for the above relationships are derived. The theoretical expressions are applied in various problems of biomedical optics in which optical characteristics of multicomponent biological tissues must be determined using the known spectral and geometrical characteristics of components. The results can be used by researchers who study light scattering in various natural and artificial media (e.g., biological tissues and sea water) that contain local scattering inclusions.