Differential description and irreversibility of depolarizing light-matter interactions

The widely used Jones and Mueller differential polarization calculi allow non-depolarizing deterministic polarization interactions to be described in an efficient way. Recently, the differential Mueller formalism has been successfully extended to the case of depolarizing transformations. In this article, a stochastic differential Jones formalism is shown to provide a clear physical insight on light depolarization, which arises when the interaction of polarized light with a medium involves randomized anisotropic properties. Based on this formalism, several intrinsic depolarization metrics which naturally arise to efficiently characterize light depolarization in a random medium are presented, and an irreversibility property of depolarizing transformations is finally established.