Optical Properties of Ellipsoidal Particles in the Geometrical Optics Approximation

Abstract

A new geometric-optics model has been developed for the calculation of polarization properties for ellipsoidal particles. The model uses the ray-tracing technique to solve the near field on the ellipsoidal particle surface, which is then transformed to the far field on the basis of the electromagnetic equivalence theorem. Sphere is special ellipsoid, so this method can calculate polarization properties of sphere particles. From comparisons with the results computed by the Mie method for sphere particle, we show that the novel geometric-optics method can be applied to the computation of the phase function of ellipsoidal particles whose size parameters along the minimum dimension are larger than 30.