Spectral domain method for the electromagnetic scattering by a buried sphere

A rigorous method to analyze the electromagnetic scattering of an elliptically polarized plane wave by a sphere buried in a dielectric half-space, is presented. The electric field components of the incident and the scattered monochromatic plane waves are expanded in series of vectorial spherical harmonics, with unknown expansion coefficients. The scattered–reflected and scattered–transmitted fields are computed by exploiting the plane-wave spectrum of the scattered field, considering the reflection and transmission of each elementary plane wave by the interface. The boundary-condition imposition leads to a linear system that returns the unknown coefficients of the scattered field. To achieve a numerical solution, a code has been implemented, and a truncation criterion for the involved series has been proposed. Comparisons with the literature and simulations performed with a commercial software are presented. A generalization of the method to the case of a short pulse scattered by a buried sphere is presented, taking into account the dispersive properties of the involved media. © 2013 Optical Society of America