December  2006,  Issue 20

 

MEETINGS:

DDA-Workshop

http://diogenes.iwt.uni-bremen.de/vt/laser/wriedt/Conferences/DDA-Workshop.html

IWT, Bremen, 23. March 2007

Light scattering programs based on methods related to the Discrete Dipole Approximation(DDA) are widely used because a number of programs is freely available and scattering by particles of almost any shape or composition can easily be computed. With this workshop we would like to invite young researchers to discuss various topics of practical interest which arise in the application or adoption of the programs for specific scattering problems. It is intended to have talks, discussions and practical information on the Discrete Dipole Approximation (DDA) especially on the following topics.

Topics

. Available programs

. Accuracy of computational results

. Parallelization

. Validation

. Particle shape input

. Large permittivity

If you are interested to participate or even like to present a talk or present some input for discussion please send a two page abstract (PDF) to one of the organizers by 31. Jan. 2007.

Preliminary list of talks

Maxim Yurkin: Current capabilities of DDA for very large particles: speed, accuracy, and computational tricks..

Roman Schuh: Arbitrary particle shape modelling in DDA and validation of simulation results.

Venue

Institut für Werkstofftechnik (IWT), Badgasteiner Str. 3, 28259 Bremen, Germany

Proceedings

We will distribute all abstracts of talks prior to the workshop by email.

Fee

There will be no fee.

Organizing Committee

Alfons Hoekstra, Section Computational Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, alfons@science.uva.nl

Thomas Wriedt, Institut für Werkstofftechnik, Bremen, Germany, thw@iwt.uni-bremen.de

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ICONO/LAT 2007

International Conference on Coherent and Nonlinear Optics collocated with Conference on Lasers, Applications, and Technologies

May 28-June 1, 2007

National Culture Center Minsk, Belarus

Call for papers

Abstract and Summary Deadline: February 1st, 2007, on-line paper submission will be open from December 1st, 2006, through the SUBMISSIONS button at the conference web-site: http://congress.phys.msu.ru/iconolat07/

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NEW PAPERS:

M. Mishchenko, V. Rosenbush, and N. Kiselev, “Weak Localization of Electromagnetic Waves and Opposition Phenomena Exhibited by High-Albedo Atrmosphereless Solar System Objects”, Applied Optics, v. 45, p. 4459-4463, 2006. 

Abstract.  The totality of new and previous optical observations of a class of high-albedo solar-system objects at small phase angles reveals a unique combination of extremely narrow brightness and polarization features centered at exactly the opposition. The specific morphological parameters of these features provide an almost unequivocal evidence that they are caused by the renowned effect of coherent backscattering.

 

Light-Scattering Codes news:

To:   Users, and potential users, of DDSCAT

From: B.T. Draine (draine@astro.princeton.edu)

      P.J. Flatau (pflatau@ucsd.edu)

Re:   DDSCAT 6.1 bug fix

Date: 2006.11.30

 

DDSCAT 6.1 (releases prior to 06.11.28) contained an error that caused incorrect values of "Pol." (= linear polarization of scattered light

when illuminated by unscattered light) to be calculated and written to the files wxxxryykzzz.sca and wxxxryyori.avg that are written when

IWRKSC=1 is specified in ddscat.par.

     The error did not affect any of the other calculated results.  In particular, the efficiency factors (Qext, Qabs, Qsca, Qbk, Qpha),

scattering moments (<cos> and <cos^2>), and Muller matrix elements S_ij (written to the output files wxxxryykzzz.sca and wxxxryyori.avg),

were correct, as were all quantities written to the files qtable and qtable2.

     The bug was in the output routine WRITESCA (file writesca.f), and consisted simply of incorrectly evaluating P from the

(correctly-calculated) Mueller matrix elements. New versions of the complete "plain" and "full" distributions of DDSCAT 6.1, with the new

version of writesca.f, can be downloaded from http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~draine/DDSCAT.6.1.html 

    Users who want only the corrected files version.f and writesca.f can extract them from the gzipped tarfile with the command

    tar xvfz ddscat6.1_plain.tgz src/version.f src/writesca.f

or

    tar xvfz ddscat6.1_full.tgz src/version.f src/writesca.f

Note also that previously-calculaed values of the Mueller matrix elements S_{11} and S_{12} can be used to calculate the correct value

of the polarization P = -S_{12}/S_{11}.