ABSTRACT
The foregoing chapters have been concerned with physical models for the scattering of
scalar
waves. These also provide a perfectly adequate description of many configurations involving the scattering and detection of a single polarized component of electromagnetic radiation, including both scattering by spherical particles, propagation through weakly scattering random media, and near-specular rough surface scattering when the tangent plane (phase screen) approximation can be used. However, in the case of scattering by moving anisotropic objects (for example, light scattering by nonspherical particles in suspension or grazing incidence backscattering from moving rough surfaces), the polarization state will change with time and this will be manifest in correlations between intensity fluctuations in different polarized components of the scattered radiation. It is well known that the state of polarization of a scattered electromagnetic wave contains additional information about the scattering object and, furthermore, can often be used as a
discriminant,
that is, exploited to distinguish a signal of interest from unwanted noise. Therefore, in this chapter some scattering models that take account of polarization effects will be described.
