title: Beam propagation in sharply peaked forward scattering media.
abstract: We calculate the radiance of a light beam propagating in a uniformly scattering and absorbing slab and determine the point-spread function. We do this by solving numerically the governing radiative transport equation by use of plane-wave mode expansions. When scattering is sharply peaked in the forward direction and it becomes difficult to solve the radiative transport equation, we replace it with either the Fokker-Planck or the Leakeas-Larsen equation. We also solve these equations by using plane-wave mode expansions. Numerical results show that these two equations agree with the radiative transport equation for large anisotropy factors. The agreement improves as the optical thickness increases.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2125, USA. adkim@math.stanford.edu
authors.forename: Arnold D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Miguel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moscoso