Electromagnetic reflection from an extended turbulent medium: Cumulative forward-scatter single-backscatter approximation

Author

de Wolf, David A.

Author_Institution

RCA Labs., Princeton, NJ, USA

Volume

19

Issue

2

fYear

1971

fDate

3/1/1971 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

254

Lastpage

262

Abstract

The backscatter cross section $Q$ for high-frequency irradiated turbulent dielectric media, many mean free paths $L_{1}$ wide, is computed. The length $L_{1}$ is the distance into the medium over which the mean electric field decreases in amplitude by a factor $e^{-1}$ . Previous calculations have always been restricted to $L \\ll L_{1}$ . It is found that $Q$ increases from the Born approximation $Q = Q_{1}$ for medium width $L \\ll L_{1}$ to $Q = 2Q_{1}$ for $L \\gg L_{1}$ , and the theory is valid as long as $L \\ll (kL_{0})^{5/3} L_{1}$ , a significant improvement over the Born approximation, when the macroscale $L_{0}$ is much larger than the wavelength $2_{\\pi}k^{-1}$ . The improvement is due to incorporation of the dominant effects of cumulative forward scattering in the local electric field in the medium. A rigorous and a heuristic derivation are given. The transitional behavior is discussed and a simple physical interpretation is given.

Keywords

Electromagnetic scattering by random media; Approximation methods; Dielectrics; Electromagnetic reflection; Electromagnetic scattering; Electrons; Force measurement; Optical reflection; Polarization; Radar scattering; Space vector pulse width modulation;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-926X

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TAP.1971.1139894

Filename

1139894