Scattering of electromagnetic radiation by multilayered spheroidal particles: recursive procedure

A formalism is developed for the calculation of the electromagnetic field scattered by a multilayered spheroidal particle. The suggested formalism utilizes the recursive approach with respect to passing from one layer to the next; thus it does not require an increase in the size of the equation matrices involved as the number of layers increases. The equations operate with matrices of the same size as for a homogeneous spheroid. The special cases of extremely prolate and weakly prolate spheroids are considered in more detail. It is shown that in such cases one can avoid the matrix calculations by instead using the iterative scalar calculations.