Anisotropy of light diffusion in a nematic liquid crystal

An explicit relation between the extinction length and magnetic coherence length has been obtained for a single-constant model of a nematic liquid crystal. The Monte Carlo calculations of backscattering and forward scattering have been performed. It has been shown that the transport length remains almost unchanged when the external magnetic field changes by an order of magnitude. As a result, multiple scattering depends only slightly on the external field. The weak anisotropy of the transport length is responsible for noticeable weakening of the anisotropy of light diffusion as compared to the anisotropy of the extinction length. It has been shown that the scattering anisotropy depends on the scattering channel and its description in terms of the light diffusion tensor is insufficient.