Polarization characteristics of electromagnetic radiation multiply scattered in a cloud of small particles

A description is given of the evolution of the polarization characteristics of electromagnetic radiation in a cloud of anisotropic position-uncorrelated particles forming a plane-parallel layer in an external uniform force field. The approach used involves the identification of an elementary volume (a thin layer) scattering by the particles of which can be calculated in the Born approximation. The system of equations for polarization matrices is reduced to a Fredholm equation of the second kind with a degenerate kernel, and thus can be solved exactly.