FINITE-ELEMENT SOLUTION OF THE MAXWELL EQUATIONS FOR ABSORPTION AND SCATTERING OF ELECTROMAGNETIC-RADIATION BY A COATED DIELECTRIC PARTICLE

The problem of absorption and scattering of electromagnetic radiation by particles can be solved analytically for only the simplest cases, b ut established numerical methods can allow a straightforward extension to particles with arbitrary inhomogeneities, shapes, and nonlinear re sponse. In this paper a recently developed finite element technique fo r the scattering and absorption by a homogeneous sphere is extended to the problem of a coated dielectric sphere of arbitrary size parameter . Numerical results showing good agreement with analytical solutions f or the size parameter of 5.93 and various core radii are presented. Re sults obtained suggest that finite element methods have promise for an alytically intractable scattering/absorption problems and show that th e Debye amplitude formulation of the problem offers some advantages in a numerical scheme.