Electromagnetic scattering by a system of two parallel dielectric prolate spheroids

Abstract

An exact solution to the problem of scattering of a plane electromagnetic wave by two dielectric prolate spheroids with parallel major axes is obtained by expanding the incident, scattered, and transmitted electric and magnetic fields in terms of an appropriate set of vector spheroidal eigenfunctions. The incident wave is considered to be a monochromatic, uniform plane electromagnetic wave of arbitrary polarization and angle of incidence. The boundary conditions are imposed by expressing the electromagnetic field scattered by one spheroid in terms of the spheroidal coordinates attached to the other, using the translational addition theorems for vector spheroidal wave functions. The column matrix of the total transmitted and scattered field-expansion coefficients is equal to the product of a square matrix, which is independent of the direction and polarization of the incident wave, and the column matrix of the known incident field-expansion coefficients. The solution of the associated set of algebraic equations gives the unknown transmitted and scattered field-expansion coefficients. Even though the problem is formulated in general, the numerical results are presented for the bistatic and backscattering cross sections of two lossless prolate spheroids with various axial ratios and center-to-center distances.