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Updated: Jul 12, 2026

Scattering And Absorption of Light in Planetary Regoliths
Published on: July 1, 2019
Light scattering by a random distribution of particles embedded in absorbing media: full-wave Monte Carlo solutions
Stéphane Durant1, Olivier Calvo-Perez, Nicolas Vukadinovic
1Laboratoire d'Energétique Moléculaire et Macroscopique, Combustion, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Châtenay-Malabry, France. stephane.durant@kla-tencor.com
Abstract:
We present a numerical investigation of the light scattering in an absorbing medium with randomly distributed scatterers. The extinction coefficient is derived from an ensemble of numerical solutions of Maxwell's equations for many different realizations of the system. Results are in good agreement with the predictions given by the effective medium theory under the independent-scattering approximation. Beyond the independent-scattering approximation, we explore the domain of validity of an effective medium theory that takes into account correlations between pairs of scatterers. A good agreement is obtained with a filling ratio up to 30% for scatterers with a relative refractive index contrast lower than 20% and size parameters near unity.
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