A far-field superposition method for 3D FDTD simulations of light scattering from multiple biological cells

Abstract

A linear superposition method for estimating the plane wave farfield scattering pattern from multiple biological cells computed by the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is presented. The method allows the FDTD simulation results of scattering from a small number of complex scatterers, such as biological cells, to be used to estimate the farfield pattern from a large group of those same scatterers. This method can be used to reduce the computational cost of FDTD simulations by allowing a single large scattering problem to be broken into smaller problems with more practical computational requirements. It has been found that the method works best in cases where there is little multiple scattering interaction between adjacent cells, so the farfield pattern of multicell geometry can simply be calculated as a phase-adjusted linear superposition of the scattering from individual cells. A strategy is also presented for choosing the minimum number of cells in cases with significant multiple scattering interactions between cells.