Peculiarities of polarised light scattering in nematic liquid crystals with large-scale director perturbations

We examine light scattering in a birefringent material, namely uniaxial nematic liquid crystal possessing macroscopic orientation perturbations (variations of director in planar alignment). Our theoretical analysis and direct experiments proved that the polarisation state of the scattered speckle-field is uniform and elliptical (in a common case). The polarisation ellipse azimuth of scattered waves is mirror reflected to one of the directly transmitted waves relative to the optical axis.