In atmospheric radiation, Chandrasekhar's X- and Y-function appears as the solutions of problems involving diffusive reflection and transmission, introduced by the Indian American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.[1][2][3][4][5] The Chandrasekhar's X- and Y-function defined in the interval , satisfies the pair of nonlinear integral equations
where the characteristic function is an even polynomial in generally satisfying the condition
and is the optical thickness of the atmosphere. If the equality is satisfied in the above condition, it is called conservative case, otherwise non-conservative. These functions are related to Chandrasekhar's H-function as
and also