Out-of-plane enhancement in a discrete random halfspace

Abstract

Although widely used to model propagation in random media, radiative transfer theory is insufficient when waves propagating in different directions exhibit strong correlation and comprise an appreciable portion of the total field. For active sensing in unbounded media, the degradation in radiative transfer's accuracy is isolated to a narrow region near backscatter. It will be shown here that in a plane-stratified random medium, mechanisms not captured by radiative transfer are significant at all azimuthal angles, although confined in zenith. This finding is significant for a multitude of bistatic sensing applications. The enhancement is examined for both electromagnetic and acoustic waves using the Foldy-Lax and distorted Born approximations in conjunction with the two-variable perturbation method.

Keywords:

• Discrete random media
• backscatter enhancement
• radiative transfer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).