The Optical Properties of Particles Deposited on a Surface
Abstract
In recent years the optical properties of particles near or on a plane surface have been the subject of several papers that deal with both the theoretical and the experimental aspects of the problem. This interest from the scientific community can be easily understood because revealing through optical measurements the presence of particles on a surface that is expected to be clean is of great importance both for industry for medicine. Among the theoretical techniques that have been proposed to deal with the problem the method of the images proved to be the most fruitful when the plane surface is a perfectly reflecting one, a condition that is met to a high degree of accuracy by many polished metallic surfaces. According to the theory of the images the problem of scattering from a particle in the vicinity of a perfectly reflecting plane surface is quite equivalent to the problem of the dependent scattering from the compound object that is composed by the actual particle and by its mirror image when excited by the superposition of the fields that come from the actual source and from its image. Of course, the method of the images is advantageous provided one is able to solve, without undue computational effort, the problem of scattering from the compound scatterer. In fact, the lack of an efficient technique to deal with this problem forced several researchers to solve the problem for limiting cases only, e. g. normal incidence, or through approximations, such as the assumption of smallness of the scattering particle.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1994
- Accession Number
- ADA286258
Entities
People
- F. Borghese
Organizations
- University of Messina