LIGHT SCATTERING BY POLYSTYRENE SPHERES ON A CONDUCTING PLANE

Abstract

A system consisting of a sphere sitting on a clean mirror was modeled as a two particle system: the real sphere and its image sphere, treating the mirror as a conducting plane. When the system was irradiated with a plane-polarized collimated laser beam with varying angles of incidence, the scattering from each particle was assumed to follow Mie's solution for light scattering by a sphere. Phase difference between the scattering by the real sphere and the one by its image sphere was assessed by the geometry of the model. The far field solutions from each of the spheres were added to yield a phase dependent intensity function. Another model assumed no phase correlation between the two and the intensities from each spheres were added. Also discussed is the Double Interaction Mode, which takes the mirror-sphere separation into consideration. These theoretical results were converted to Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions (BRDF). The theoretical as well as the empirical surface scattering from a good quality optical surface was introduced. The BRDF values thus calculated were added to the background scattering by the mirror since no interaction was assumed between the spheres and the rough metallic surface of the mirror. The test sample was prepared with polystyrene spheres with the nominal diameter of 0.984 μm on a high quality aluminum mirror. The BRDF data from this sample with 6328Å and 4416Å were compared with the one obtained with the model described above. The comparison strongly indicated that there existed no phase correlation between the scatterings by the two spheres. Determination of the sphere size and practical applicability for estimating the sphere number density on the surface are also discussed.