LIGHT-SCATTERING FROM A SLICED TARGET THROUGH USE OF THE INTERNAL FIELD OF INFINITE CYLINDERS - COMPARISON BETWEEN MIE THEORY AND A SLICED SPHERE

Light scattering from a particle that can be sectioned into circular s lices is calculated by performing a coherent integration of the intern al field over the volume of the target. The internal field in each sli ce is taken to be the internal-field solution of an infinite cylinder of radius equal to the radius of the slice. It is shown that for a sph erical scatterer with size parameters up to 1.4, the integration leads to results that are in good agreement with those predicted by the Mie theory. Thus, we show the remarkable result that the internal field f rom an infinite cylinder can reproduce scattering intensities for such a radically different shape as a sphere. This being the case, a wide variety of target shapes between a sphere and a cylinder should be ope n to evaluation by this technique. The approach also has the benefit o f being computationally efficient, requiring a double integration of t he internal field over a disk and then coherently adding these calcula tions. The computations demonstrated in this paper are performed relat ively quickly on a computer such as the Macintosh Centris 650, and thi s efficiency allows us to obtain the scattered fields for many target shapes.