We focus primarily on the bulk response to external illumination of conservatively scattering thick inhomogeneous media (or simply "clouds") which are exactly or statistically scale invariant; these radiative properties are compared to those of homogeneous media with the same shapes and masses. Also considered are the ensemble-average responses of multifractal distributions of optical thicknesses and the closely related spatially averaged responses obtained within the "independent pixel" approximation to inhomogeneous transfer. In all cases, the nonlinearity of the radiation/density field coupling induces systematic and specific variability effects. Generally speaking, the details of the scattering process and of the boundary shape affect only prefactors whereas "anomalous" scaling exponents are found for extreme forms of internal variability which, moreover, are different for different physical transport models (e.g., kinetic versus diffusion approaches). Finally, detailed numerical computations of radiation flows inside a log-normal multifractal illustrate the basic inhomogeneous transport mechanism of "channeling."
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.39357 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Davis, Anthony |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Physics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001286589, proquestno: NN74934, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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