Coherent backscattering of a light pulse by a slab of disordered medium

We obtain an exact analytical solution to the problem of the enhanced backscattering of a short pulsed signal from a two- and three-dimensional medium with isotropically scattering centres. The angular spectrum is expressed in terms of the solution to the corresponding stationary problem. The intensity oscillations are shown to appear on the tails of the angular spectrum. The origin of these oscillations is associated with the ballistic phase shift between the interfering waves arriving at the detector. It is shown that the finiteness of the slab thickness influences the magnitude of the backscattering intensity and does not change the shape of the angular spectrum. The range of validity for the diffusion approximation is pointed out.

The results obtained in the paper also contain a generalization of the well known solution to the problem of incoherent transfer to a pulsed signal to the case of two-dimensional disordered media.