Scattering, Extinction, and Albedo of Impedance-Boundary Objects

This article presents results on the scattering and absorption behavior of lossy impedance boundary spheres and cubes. The albedo (the ratio between the scattering and extinction cross sections) of these scatterers turns out to be a very insightful quantity in this respect. The strongly nonlinear dependence of albedo on the size of the objects is illustrated and compared with the albedo of dissipative penetrable spheres. The shape of the object seems to have
surprisingly little effect on the albedo. Furthermore, the effect of losses on the resonance behavior of small impedance-boundary spheres is analyzed, leading to the observation that the dipolar mode vanishes from the albedo spectrum, while higher order multipoles remain visible. This resembles a similar phenomenon earlier shown to appear in connection with small plasmonic scatterers.