Effect of light beam on measurements of reflectance and transmittance of turbid media with integrating sphere: Monte Carlo simulation

Integrating sphere technique is widely used to measure the total reflectance and transmittance of turbid sample, but the unavoidable light loss induces some measuring error. It has never been reported whether the error depends on the shape and size of light beam. In this paper, a convolution for computing the responses to rectangular incident light beam based on the Monte Carlo method was presented. The effects of light beam shape and size, and optical properties of sample on the measurements were addressed. The results show that the light loss with rectangular incident light beam is larger than that with circular one with the same area. The more the area of light beam, the more the light loss. And the light loss induced by the optical properties of sample is much more significant than that by the shape and size of the incident light beam.