The Effect of Anisotropic Properties of Randomly Oriented Particles on Polarized Light: An Operational Calculus for Spatially Heterogeneous Distributions

Abstract

Recent publication of the application of Mueller-Stokes calculus to a model of optical microdomains by Hjelm et al, (Biopolymers vol. 25 1359–1378, 1986) states that the circular dichroism (CD), of randomly orientated microdomains, show apparent CD due to the linear dichroism components. In this paper we show that these conclusions are erroneous due to a misapplication of the Mueller calculus to the model proposed by Hjelm et al. We further prove that ordinary Stokes vectors do not represent the polarization properties of light in systems that are a heterogeneous distribution of optical microdomains in the plane perpendicular to the light beam and the Mueller matrices cannot be used to compute the interaction of light with these heterogeneous distributions of optical microdomains. A modified optical calculus is proposed, in which extended space matrices and extended space polarization vectors will give the correct formulation for the heterogeneous distribution of microdomains.