Efficient computation of arbitrary beam scattering on a sphere: Comments and rebuttal, with a review on the angular spectrum decomposition.
Abstract
The present paper may be viewed as built from comments concerning a recently published paper in Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, and actually constitutes as well a rebuttal of some of the claims it contains. The issue considered concerns the computation of scattering properties of the interaction between an arbitrary electromagnetic shaped beam and a homogeneous sphere. Our discussion of the issue may be easily extended as well to more general cases, beyond the simplest case of a homogeneous spherical scatterer, up to the case of arbitrary shaped particles in the framework of T-matrix formulation. Finally, we take the opportunity of the present paper to review the use of the angular spectrum decomposition in light scattering.