What happens when you shine light on objects that are roughly the same size as the wavelength of the light, such as soot particles in the atmosphere, red blood cells, or aerosol droplets produced by coughing? The best way to analyze such problems turns out to be to treat them as scattering phenomena: an incident light wave interacts with the object and gets changed (scattered and/or absorbed) as a result – much like how ripples in a pond are scattered when they run into something on the surface of the water.
In this talk, I will introduce the physics and mathematics of light scattering, which involves ideas from partial differential equations and linear algebra. I will focus specifically on numerical techniques for calculating scattering from clusters of spheres, for which there is no general analytical solution. I will discuss the application of these techniques to two computational physics projects in my group: validating an experimental technique for optically characterizing particles that are fractal aggregates, and modeling how non-spherical particles behave in optical tweezers and other complex beams.
Jerome Fung, Ithaca College Department of Physics & Astronomy
Monday, April 24
4pm in Williams 320
sponsored by the Math Department Colloquium series
contact: tgalanthay@ithaca.edu (Prof. Ted Galanthay)