SphericalScattering: A Julia Package for Electromagnetic Scattering from Spherical Objects

Abstract

When electromagnetic fields are impinging on objects of various kinds, determining the scattered field as a solution to Maxwell's equations is crucial for many applications. For example, when monitoring the position of an airplane by a radar, the scattering behavior of the airplane plays a pivotal role and, thus, needs to be studied. Analytical approaches, however, to characterize such scattering behavior are rarely known. Some of the few exceptions where at least semi-analytical descriptions are available are metallic or dielectric spherical objects excited by time-harmonic or static fields (Jin, 2015;Ruck et al., 1970). In some applications, these canonical scattering problems are the study subject of interest. In other areas, solutions to the scattering from spherical objects rather serve as a means to verify the correctness of more involved numerical techniques, which allow to analyze the scattering from real-world objects, for instance, via finite element or integral equation methods (Adrian et al., 2021;Harrington, 1993;Jin, 2015;Rao et al., 1982). Hence, semi-analytical descriptions for the scattering from spherical objects facilitate a reproducible and comparable verification of approaches to solve electromagnetic scattering problems.