Study of polarization memory's impact on detection range in natural water fogs.

The influence of the initial polarization state of a source on the detection range of a system probing through natural dense water fog is analyzed. Information about the source is conveyed by ballistic, snake, and highly scattered photons. During propagation, the polarization state of ballistic and snake photons is not altered. It is shown that though circular polarization is not altered by simple direction changes during scattering, and has thus a tendency to be preserved longer in the highly scattered photons, it does not necessarily convey more useful information about the source than linear polarization or even an unpolarized beam. It is also shown that in any forward propagating system that can be described by the small-angle approximation the impact of polarization memory can be neglected.