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Updated: Aug 20, 2025

Scattering And Absorption of Light in Planetary Regoliths
Published on: July 1, 2019
Unified treatment of exact and approximate scalar electromagnetic wave scattering
Subeen Pang1, George Barbastathis1
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Abstract:
Under conditions of strong scattering, a dilemma often arises regarding the best numerical method to use. Main competitors are the Born series, the beam propagation method, and direct solution of the Lippmann-Schwinger equation. However, analytical relationships between the three methods have not yet, to our knowledge, been explicitly stated. Here, we bridge this gap in the literature. In addition to overall insight about aspects of optical scattering that are best numerically captured by each method, our approach allows us to derive approximate error bounds to be expected under various scattering conditions.
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