Analytical cumulant solution of the vector radiative transfer equation investigates backscattering of circularly polarized light from turbid media.

The backscattering of circularly polarized light pulses from an infinite uniform scattering medium is studied as a function of helicity of the incident light and size of scatterers in the medium. The approach considers a polarized short pulse of light incident on the scattering medium, and uses an analytical cumulant solution of the vector radiative transfer equation with the phase matrix obtained from the Mie theory to calculate the temporal profile of scattered polarized photons for any position and any angle of detection. The general expression for the scattered photon distribution function is an expansion in spatial cumulants up to an arbitrary high order. Truncating the expansion at the second-order cumulant, a Gaussian analytical approximate expression for the temporal profile of scattered polarized photons is obtained, whose average center position and half width are always exact. The components of scattered light copolarized and cross polarized with that of the incident light can be calculated and used for determining the degree of polarization of the scattered light. The results show that circularly polarized light of the same helicity dominates the backscattered signal when scatterer size is larger than the wavelength of light. For the scatterers smaller than the wavelength, the light of opposite helicity makes the dominant contribution to the backscattered signal. The theoretical estimates are in good agreement with our experimental results.