A Monte Carlo method for 3D radiative transfer equations with multifractional singular kernels

Abstract

We propose in this work a Monte Carlo method for three dimensional scalar radiative transfer equations with non-integrable, space-dependent scattering kernels. Such kernels typically account for long-range statistical features, and arise for instance in the context of wave propagation in turbulent atmosphere, geophysics, and medical imaging in the peaked-forward regime. In contrast to the classical case where the scattering cross section is integrable, which results in a non-zero mean free time, the latter here vanishes. This creates numerical difficulties as standard Monte Carlo methods based on a naive regularization exhibit large jump intensities and an increased computational cost. We propose a method inspired by the finance literature based on a small jumps - large jumps decomposition, allowing us to treat the small jumps efficiently and reduce the computational burden. We demonstrate the performance of the approach with numerical simulations and provide a complete error analysis. The multifractional terminology refers to the fact that the high frequency contribution of the scattering operator is a fractional Laplace-Beltrami operator on the unit sphere with space-dependent index.