Light scattering by large particles: physical optics and the shadow-forming field

Abstract

There are a lot of excellent books and papers considering the theory and various approximations to the problem of light scattering by spherical and nonspherical particles (see, for example, van de Hulst, 1981; Bohren and Huffman, 1983; Kokhanovsky, 1999; Mishchenko et al., 2002; and numerous references therein). These works start from the fundamental Maxwell equations and then the desired solutions are derived from the Maxwell equations as some series. Finally, these series are summarized by a computer code. However, such procedures are effective for relatively small nonspherical particles and the maximum particle size occurs to be strongly dependent on computer power. At present, this particle size limit is reached at, say, under the condition: (particle size)/(incident wavelength) <20. Otherwise such calculations become too computationally expensive.