Monte Carlo simulations in anomalous radiative transfer: a tutorial

Abstract

Anomalous radiative transfer (ART) theory is a generalization of classical radiative transfer theory. The present tutorial wants to show how Monte Carlo (MC) codes describing photons transport in anomalous media can be implemented. It is shown that the heart of the method consists in suitably describing, in a "non-classical" manner, photons steps starting from fixed light sources or from boundaries separating regions of the medium with different optical properties. To give a better intuition of the importance of these particular photon step lengths, it is also shown numerically that the described approach is essential to preserve the invariance property for light propagation. An interesting byproduct of the MC method for ART, is that it allow us to simplify the structure of "classical" MC codes, utilized e.g. in biomedical optics.