On the accuracy of perturbative solutions to wave scattering from rough closed surfaces.

The method of small perturbations is applied to the problem of plane-wave scattering from a soft circular surface with sinusoidal roughness. Rayleigh-theory and extinction-theorem perturbative solutions of arbitrary order are developed, and they are compared to each other as well as to an exact solution. A numerical study yields quantitative information about effects associated with the use of the Rayleigh hypothesis, about the merit of higher-order solutions, and about the reliability of the error criteria that measure a posteriori the conformity of perturbative solutions to the boundary condition. It is shown that the accuracy of perturbative solutions depends not only on the height, but also on the slope, of surface corrugations. Moreover, it is shown that the Rayleigh hypothesis does not affect the accuracy of far-field perturbative calculations. The mean extinction error is proposed as a measure for the error of the extinction-theorem perturbative solution.

Interactive resonant scattering by a cluster of air bubbles in water.

An exact, analytical solution is developed for the problem of acoustic-wave scattering from a cluster of ideal, gaseous, spherical bubbles in an unbounded, homogeneous, host fluid. This solution takes into account all modes of oscillation of the bubbles as well as all interactions between them; it is applicable to a wide range of bubble sizes and excitation frequencies. In the low frequency regime, the theory of this paper is shown to reduce to the "monopole" approximation, the effect of higher-order modes being non-negligible only for very small bubble-to-bubble separations. A numerical study of interactive backscattering from small clusters, comprising up to three ideal bubbles, is presented. Interactions between the bubbles are shown to produce downward shifts in the resonance frequency of the cluster, when the scattering configuration is symmetric. Furthermore, asymmetries of the scattering configuration are shown to generate sharp resonances at frequencies above the resonance of the symmetric mode. The results of this paper agree with previous theoretical and experimental work.

Light scattering by arbitrarily oriented rotationally symmetric particles.

We use the T-matrix approach and the analytical orientation-averaging technique to formulate the problem of light scattering by an ensemble of rotationally symmetric particles in arbitrary orientation. The mathematical formulation yields analytical expressions for the elements of the ensemble-averaged scattering matrix that involve no more than four nested summations. An expansion into generalized spherical functions is used in the particular case where the scatterers are partially aligned along the direction of incidence. A computer code that implements the analytical expressions derived is publicly available on the World Wide Web at http://irctr.et.tudelft.nl/ -Skaropoulos/T-matrix.htm.