Diffusion of light in structurally anisotropic media with uniaxial symmetry

Abstract

Anisotropic light transport is extremely common among scattering materials, yet a comprehensive picture of how macroscopic diffusion is determined by microscopic tensor scattering coefficients is not fully established yet. In this work, we present a theoretical and experimental study of diffusion in structurally anisotropic media with uniaxially symmetric scattering coefficients. Exact analytical relations are derived in the case of index-matched turbid media, unveiling the general relation between microscopic scattering coefficients and the resulting macroscopic diffusion tensor along different directions. Excellent agreement is found against anisotropic Monte Carlo simulations up to high degrees of anisotropy, in contrast with previously proposed approaches. The obtained solutions are used to analyze experimental measurements of anisotropic light transport in polystyrene foam samples under different degrees of uniaxial compression, providing a practical example of their applicability.