Inverse Adding-Doubling

by Scott Prahl

April 2024

Overview

Inverse Adding-Doubling is a command-line program that determines the intrinsic optical properties of a flat scattering and absoption sample using measurements of the total reflection and transmission. Basically, optical properties are repeatedly guessed until the calculated reflection and transmission match the measured values. The program accounts for realistic measurement constraints associated with integrating sphere effects.

This package provides two executables ad and iad. The first does a forward adding-doubling calculation (i.e., given the albedo, optical thickness, and anisotropy it returns the total reflection and transmission). The second does the reverse.

This program Prahl et al., Applied Optics, 32, 559-568, 1993 uses the Adding-Doubling method of van de Hulst Multiple Light Scattering, Academic Press, 1978. I extended the Adding-Doubling method to account for Fresnel reflection at boundaries as well as corrections that must accompany integrating sphere experiments.

Finally, integrating spheres do not always collect all the light that exits from the front or back surface of a sample. Since this is impossible to account for the 1D adding-doubling technique, a Monte Carlo simulation is embedded in the inverse calculation.

Details about using the program are documented in the accompanying manual.

Installation

Obtaining executables from source entails unzipping and running make (See INSTALL.md for more details.) Windows executables are available in the iad-win-3-16-2.zip releases.

Usage

Inverting a single measurement on the command line

To find the optical properties of a 1mm thick sample with 40% total reflectance and 10% total transmission

    ./iad -r 0.4 -t 0.1 -d 1

which will generate output that ends with

#       Measured   M_R     Measured   M_T    Estimated Estimated Estimated
##wave     M_R     fit        M_T     fit       mu_a     mu_s'       g    
# [nm]    [---]    [---]     [---]    [---]     1/mm     1/mm      [---]  
     1   0.4000   0.4000    0.1000   0.0999    0.4673   3.9317    0.0000    *

The process can be reversed by doing a forward calculation with the -z option. Here -A 0.4673 sets the absorption coefficient, and -j 3.9317 sets the reduced scattering coefficient). Specifying the thickness -d 1 is necessary because the default thickness is infinite.

    ./iad -z -A 0.4673 -j 3.9317 -d 1

produces output that ends with

#       Measured    M_R    Measured    M_T    Estimated Estimated Estimated
##wave     M_R      fit       M_T      fit      mu_a      mu_s'       g    
# [nm]    [---]    [---]     [---]    [---]     1/mm      1/mm      [---]  
     0   0.0000   0.4000    0.0000   0.0999    0.4673    3.9317     0.0000    * 

For Windows, there are executable binaries ad.exe and iad.exe compiled using MinGW-w64. These apps can be run using the Command Prompt application cmd.exe. These binaries are packaged in the separate iad-win distributions on github or omlc.

Inverting spectral data

Often one wants the optical properties over an entire spectrum. A good example was recently provide by @anishabahl. This measurement was made with a spectrophotometer equipped with a dual beam integrating sphere. The input data looks includes the total reflection and transmission as well a header that describes the experiment. The reflection and transmission data look like this

The input file is processed with

    iad -X -i 8 -g 0.9 phantom-with-no-slides.rxt

The option i 8 indicates that light is incident on the sample at an angle of 8°, -X indicates that a sphere with dual beams was used, and -g 0.9 indicates the default scattering anisotropy. Note that in the PDMS file, the refractive index of the sample changes with each data point

This command will produce an output file that when plotted looks like

which matches the intrinsic absorption of Wacker PDMS found in Cai's 2008 Disseration

This is an excellent set of measurements because there is almost no influence of the absorption coefficient on the scattering coefficient.

Jupyter support

As of March 2024, there is now a python command-line script iadplus that will analyze an .rxt input file and graph the results. Everything is assembled into a Jupyter notebook for convenience. You may need to install some python modules to be able to use iadplus

iadplus -options '-i 8 -X ' file.rxt

will run iad and produce file-notebook/file.ipynb along with a bunch of .svg files used in the Jupyter notebook file.ipynb

Author

Scott Prahl

http://omlc.org/~prahl