Substrate effect on scattering by a chiral sphere
Abstract
The effect of stratified substrates on scattering from a chiral sphere is analytically and numerically examined. A combination of vector Mie solution and the field transformations between vector spherical functions (VSFs) and plane waves (PWs) is used to determine the scattered fields of different orders. The generalized reflection coefficients of the stratified half-space and vector Mie solution for the chiral sphere are used to calculate successive interactions of the sphere and the interface and a series solution is obtained. Commercial software FEKO is used to numerically validate the derived expressions for the multilayered substrate. Various numerical results are presented and discussed. Specifically, a slab with exponential profile is considered as an example of an inhomogeneous substrate and its scattering coefficients are compared with the homogeneous case. © 2021 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement