Finite slab first passage statistics of Henyey Greenstein scattering

A photon entering a plane parallel scattering slab performs a random walk and eventually escapes through one of the two faces or is absorbed.

The scattering distribution is a Henyey Greenstein phase function and the step length distribution is exponential.

The central result of this paper is that the reflectance, transmittance, absorptance, and emergent angular distributions can all be expressed in terms of the first passage statistics of the walk.

Two approaches are used.

In the Monte Carlo MC approach, an extremely long random walk with many steps is efficiently generated without regard to any boundaries.

The intersection of this walk with a large collection of target objects creates an ensemble of excursions of the objects.

The MC approach relies explicitly on the memoryless property of the exponential distribution so that the portion of the first and last steps inside the object follow the same length distribution as the walk steps.

The details of each excursion are recorded and any statistics can be extracted, to the sampling precision, from the database of excursions.

In particular, first passage statistics are extracted from this ensemble.

In this work the objects are slabs with different positions and thicknesses.

In the radiative transfer RT approach the slab is divided into thin layers with scattering treated to first order in each layer.

The RT equations are then directly integrated over the slab to give the desired first passage statistics.

In the RT approach reflection, transmission and absorption are found to the precision of the RT solver.

The two methods agree to the precision of the MC over the tested range of random walk parameters.