High frequency scattering by an impenetrable sphere

Abstract

The high frequency scattering of a scalar plane wave from an impenetrable sphere with a diameter of several thousand wavelengths is treated by the Sommerfeld-Watson transformation, the saddle-point technique (SPT), and the numerical steepest descent method (NSDM). Both the near and far fields for the sphere are computed within the observation angle range of 0 to 180 degree. First, with the aid of the Watson transformation, the fast-convergent residue series replacing the slow-convergent Mie series is derived. Second, a new algorithm for finding the zeros of the Hankel functions is developed. Third, a novel NSDM, which is adaptive to frequency and is hence frequency independent, is proposed to overcome the breakdown of the traditional SPT in the transition region. Numerical results show that when the observation angle is very small, the Mie series solution of the near-field will not be accurate due to error accumulation. Furthermore, using the proposed methods, the CPU times for both the near-field and far-field calculations are frequency independent with controllable error. This work can be used to benchmark future works for high-frequency scattering.