Focused Laser Beam Scattering by Stationary and Moving Particles: a Theoretical Study.

A general method of solution to laser beam scattering problems is presented. This method makes use of the plane wave spectrum representation of the beam. By this way beam scattering results can be considered as an integral superposition of the single plane wave scattering results. This method can not be used for scatterers with nonlinear properties, because superposition principle can not be applied for such cases. Several examples showing the applications of the method which is mentioned above, are given. In these examples; results of the focused laser beam scattering by the following particles are studied: small, arbitrarily shaped tenuous scatterers, exact solution for arbitrarily shaped homogeneous particles, a statistical ensemble of small dynamic particles (a dilute solution of spherical macromolecules), and a single, translating spherical scatterer. Discussions on the practical uses of the results of each example are presented.