Influence of particle shape models on T-matrix light scattering simulation

Abstract

Simulation of light scattering gets more and more important; topics of interest are for example characterization of the shape of particles, detection of airborne fibers, determination of spherical and non-spherical particles, etc. To develop advanced methods for optical particle characterization corresponding light scattering theories and simulation programs are needed. For these kinds of simulations adequate input data representing the particle shape is important. If a specific particle shape is obtained from some reconstruction method the model will only be an approximation of the real shape. So the quality of this input particle shape has influence on the quality of the obtained results.In our research we concentrate on the development of the null-field method with discrete sources for light scattering simulation. With this method the T-matrix of complex structured particles can be computed. This paper gives an overview of solving light scattering problems with the null-field method with discrete sources and shows the influence of the accuracy of the particle shape model on the computed scattering results.