Electromagnetic scattering of an inhomogeneous elliptically polarized plane wave by a multilayered sphere

In this paper, a rigorous method in order to analyze the electromagnetic scattering by a multilayered sphere of an inhomogeneous elliptically polarized plane wave, is presented. One has to do with inhomogeneous plane waves when the scatterer is immersed in a medium generally dispersive and dissipative. The expression of the vectorial spherical harmonics expansion of an inhomogeneous elliptically polarized plane wave has been derived using the Legendre functions generalized via hypergeometric and gamma functions. The problem of the stratified sphere has been solved using the transfer-matrix approach, applied to each spherical surface, obtaining the coefficients of the scattered field and the internal field to the sphere system. In order to validate the presented method, a Matlab code and a numerical model based on the finite element method has been implemented. The comparison between the two methods is shown.