Light scattering from a sphere on or near a surface

Abstract

The light-scattering problem of a sphere on or near a plane surface is solved by using an extension of the Mie theory. The approach taken is to solve the boundary conditions at the sphere and at the surface simultaneously and to develop the scattering amplitude and Mueller scattering matrices. This is performed by projecting the fields in the half-space region not including the sphere multiplied by an appropriate Fresnel reflection coefficient onto the half-space region including the sphere. An assumption is that the scattered fields from the sphere, reflecting off the surface and interacting with the sphere, are incident upon the surface at near-normal incidence. The exact solution is asymptotically approached when either the sphere is a large distance from the surface or the refractive index of the surface approaches infinity.