On an integral equation arising in the transport of radiation through a slab involving internal reflection

Abstract

In an earlier contribution to this journal [M.M.R. Williams, Eur. Phys. J. B 47, 291 (2005)], we derived an integral equation for the transmission of radiation through a slab of finite thickness which incorporated internal reflection at the surfaces. Here we generalise the problem to the case when there is a source on each face and the reflection coefficients are different at each face. We also discuss numerical and analytic solutions of the equation discussed in [M.M.R. Williams, Eur. Phys. J. B 47, 291 (2005)] when the reflection is governed by the Fresnel conditions. We obtain numerical and graphical results for the reflection and transmission coefficients, the scalar intensity and current and the emergent angular distributions at each face. The incident source is either a mono-directional beam or a smoothly varying distribution which goes from isotropic to a normal beam. Of particular interest is the philosophy of the numerical solution and whether a direct numerical approach is more effective than one involving a more elegant analytical solution using replication and the Hilbert problem. We also develop the solution of this problem using diffusion theory and compare the results with the exact transport solution.