What happens to scattered light when intensity of light increases?
In most situations we are familiar with when it comes to light in everyday life, the interaction with light and matter is linear with respect to the electromagnetic field. This means that if you have a material that scatters 50% of a beam of light, then a 2mW beam will scatter 1mW or a 100mW will scatter 50mW etc… In these normal everyday situations, increasing the intensity of the incident light does not increase the proportion of the light that is scattered.However, if the intensity of the light is great enough (such as at the focus of an ultra-short pulsed laser beam), then the light will no longer interact with matter in a linear way. This situation is known as nonlinear optics. In this situation the light is intense enough that the material itself temporarily changes, and this change causes the light to interact differently with the material. In these situations, the scattering does depend on the intensity of the light. This effect is used all the time in fields such as microscopy and spectroscopy.
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