An Analytical Method of Electromagnetic Wave Scattering by a Highly Conductive Sphere in a Lossless Medium with Low-Frequency Dipolar Excitation

Abstract

The current research involves an analytical method of electromagnetic wave scattering by an impenetrable spherical object, which is immerged in an otherwise lossless environment. The highly conducting body is excited by an arbitrarily orientated time-harmonic magnetic dipole that is located at a reasonable remote distance from the sphere and operates at low frequencies for the physical situation under consideration, wherein the wavelength is much bigger than the size of the object. Upon this assumption, the scattering problem is formulated according to expansions of the implicated magnetic and electric fields in terms of positive integer powers of the wave number of the medium, which is linearly associated to the implied frequency. The static Rayleigh zeroth-order case and the initial three dynamic terms provide an excellent approximation for the obtained solution, while terms of higher orders are of minor significance and are neglected, since we work at the low-frequency regime. To this end, Maxwell’s equations reduce to a finite set of interrelated elliptic partial differential equations, each one accompanied by the perfectly electrically conducting boundary conditions on the metal sphere and the necessary limiting behavior as we move towards theoretical infinity, which is in practice very far from the observation domain. The presented analytical technique is based on the introduction of a suitable spherical coordinated system and yields compact fashioned three-dimensional solutions for the scattered components in view of infinite series expansions of spherical harmonic modes. In order to secure the validity and demonstrate the efficiency of this analytical approach, we invoke an example of reducing already known results from the literature to our complete isotropic case.