| Scope and method of study. The objective of the present work is to obtain the exact numerical solutions of one-dimensional radiative transfer with polarization fully included by using a procedure similar to that which Ambarzumian applied to the scalar problem.;Findings and conclusions. The exact expressions were derived for the source matrices, reflection and transmission matrices, reflected and transmitted intensity matrices, and reflected and transmitted flux matrices at the boundaries of a plane-parallel medium which scatters, absorbs, and is exposed to incident polarized radiation. The polarized phase matrix of the medium is general, requiring only that the scattering particles be randomly oriented and have one plane of symmetry. Numerical results were presented for various physical phenomena. In addition, these results were compared with the solutions of the diffusion approximation for polarized light as well as the exact results for the scalar problem. The comparison shows that the diffusion approximation can predict the state of the polarization qualitatively well; while the intensity for the scalar problem is equal to the intensity including polarization effects when the number of Legendre polynomials in the polarization phase matrix is one. |
