Reflection of waves from a strong scatterer buried in a random medium

Reflection of waves from a mirror covered by a random layer of isotropic, absorbing scatterers is studied and the angular distribution of the scattered intensity is calculated both analytically and numerically. It is shown that backscattering enhancement as well as an enhancement of the incoherent signal in the specular direction take place even in the singly scattered random field. The dependence of the retroreflected intensity is shown to be a non-monotonic function of the depth of the mirror, with a maximum at a depth of the order of the scattering mean free path. Possibilities for employing the results obtained to detect buried strong scatterers and to retrieve parameters of the random media are discussed. In particular, it is shown that in the case of strong absorption the reflecting plane manifests itself by the presence of a peak in the retroreflected intensity which is missing from the scattering diagram of a free-standing or an infinitely thick random layer.