A NUMERICAL EVALUATION OF RAYLEIGHS THEORY APPLIED TO SCATTERING BY RANDOMLY ROUGH DIELECTRIC SURFACES

We present a numerical simulation of scattering by one-dimensional ran domly rough surfaces. It is based on the use of plane-wave expansions to describe the fields on the surface (i.e. Rayleigh hypothesis). Accu racy and convergence properties of two different numerical implementat ions are studied. Some examples of results for a dielectric and a meta llic Gaussian rough surface are shown to be in good agreement with cal culations by a rigorous numerical method. The Rayleigh method appears to be a fast computation tool for dielectric surfaces with slopes of l ess than 0.2.