January  2009     ISSUE 28

Meetings

PIERS in Moscow: scattering and radiative transfer

Dear Colleague,

There will be a session entitled "Light Scattering and Radiative Transfer: Theories and Applications" at the upcoming PIERS meeting in Moscow, Russia, 18-21 August, 2009. We would like to invite you to submit an abstract to this session.

Detailed information on this session can be found via the following link:

http://piers.mit.edu/piers2k9Moscow/session.php?session_id=S016

The deadline for abstract submission is February 20, 2009. More information can be found via the following link:

http://piers.mit.edu/piers2k9Moscow/

We are very much looking forward to your participation in this conference.

          Ping Yang and Michael Mishchenko

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DDSCAT 7.0 release

A new release of the discrete-dipole approximation scattering code DDSCAT is now available -- DDSCAT 7.0 .  This release supersedes the previous release, version 6.1

    DDSCAT 7.0 contains a number of new features.  In particular:

* Draine & Flatau (2009) show how the DDA can be used to calculate  scattering and absorption by targets that are periodic in one or two   dimensions.  DDSCAT 7.0 can calculate scattering by isolated  targets, by targets that are periodic in one dimension and finite in  the other two, or by targets that are periodic in two dimensions and  finite in the third.  This has obvious application to light scattering by arrays of nanostructures.

* The DDSCAT 7.0 package includes a separate program DDfield.f90 for  postprocessing to calculate E and B fields in or near the target.

* DDSCAT 7.0 can now calculate absorption and scattering by targets   containing arbitrarily-oriented anisotropic materials.

* DDSCAT 7.0 is written in portable fortran 90, and uses dynamic   memory allocation.

* DDSCAT 7.0 can be compiled in either single or double precision.

* DDSCAT 7.0 supports use of MPI for running parallel calculation on  separate cpus.

* DDSCAT 7.0 supports OpenMP, allowing certain parts of the  calculation to be done in parallel if multiple cores are available  on the compute node.

* DDSCAT 7.0 allows use of the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) DFTI routines for computing FFTs.

* The MPI, OpenMP, and MKL features can be easily enabled or disabled  by setting flags in the Makefile.

* As with previous versions, DDSCAT 7.0 comes with an extensive  UserGuide: http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.0337

 

The DDSCAT 7.0 package can be downloaded from    http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~draine/DDSCAT7.0.html

        DDSCAT 7.0 is gratis, subject to the GNU General Public License.  You may copy, distribute, and/or modify the software identified as under this agreement.  If you distribute copies of this software, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have.

        As always, please let us know if you encounter problems downloading DDSCAT, or if you have trouble using DDSCAT (but **please** read the manual carefully before reporting problems!!).  If you were a user of DDSCAT 6.1, note that you will need to modify your ddscat.par files before they will work with DDSCAT 7.0 .  The UserGuide explains what is needed.

 

We hope that DDSCAT will prove useful in your research.

      B.T. Draine       P.J. Flatau

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New Papers

Mishchenko, M. I., M. J. Berg, C. M. Sorensen, and C. V. M. van der Mee, 2009: On definition and measurement of extinction cross section, J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 110, doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2008.11.010.

Tishkovets, V. P., and M. I. Mishchenko, 2009: Approximate calculation of coherent backscattering for semi-infinite discrete random media, J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 110, 139-145.

Mishchenko, M. I., and J. M. Dlugach, 2008: Accuracy of the scalar approximation in computations of diffuse and coherent backscattering by discrete random media, Phys. Rev. A 78, 063822.

Mishchenko, M. I., 2008: Broadband electromagnetic scattering by particles, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 25, 2893-2895.

Liu, L., M. I. Mishchenko, and W. P. Arnott, 2008: A study of radiative properties of fractal soot aggregates using the superposition T-matrix method, J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 109, 2656-2663.

The publications are available at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/~crmim/publications  in the PDF format

 Y. Okada, I.Mann, T.Mukai, M.Koehler, "Extended calculation of  polarization and intensity of fractal aggregates based on rigorous  method for light scattering simulations with numerical orientation averaging", JQSRT, accepted.

   http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jqsrt.2008.05.014

Abstract

     The intensity and polarization of fractal aggregates have been  investigated using both rigorous and approximate methods for light  scattering simulations. However, previous studies using the analytical orientation averaging version of the rigorous method were generally  limited to a few hundred monomers when the monomer size parameter was  around 1.7. In this study, we propose using numerical orientation  averaging instead of analytical orientation averaging. The numerical averaging is performed together with a fixed orientation version of  the rigorous T-matrix method for clusters of spheres. This approach  enables increasing the number of monomers by a factor of 2-7 or the size of monomers by a factor of 8-10 compared to the analytical  orientation averaging version. We investigated the influence of monomer size and the number of  monomers on the light scattering of silicate aggregates (refractive index m=1.68+0.03i) for incident light with a wavelength of 0.6 um.  We considered ballistic particle-cluster aggregates (BPCA) and  ballistic cluster-cluster aggregates (BCCA) composed of 128, 256, 512,  and 1024 monomers with radii between 0.11 and 0.17 μm. Our results show that the size of monomers plays an important role in  reproducing the negative polarization branch for all the BPCA and  BCCA. Silicate aggregates with the monomer radius of less than 0.17 μm  contribute to reproducing the negative polarization branch, while  aggregates with monomers larger than 0.17 μm do not have the negative  polarization branch. Polarization oscillation with scattering angle  occurs for larger monomers (i.e., monomer radius > 0.3 μm).  The maximum polarization decreases for increasing monomer radius  between 0.11 and 0.17 μm. However, the negative polarization branch is  generally enhanced for monomer radii up to around 0.15 μm, and reduced for further increase of monomer size.  The number of monomers also has a large influence on the negative  polarization branch in the case of BPCA. The increase in the number of  monomers from 128 to 1024 shifts the scattering angle of minimum polarization to larger angles for BPCA. In addition, the increase in the number of monomers reduces the values of negative polarization for BPCA while the variation with the number of monomers for BCCA is small and is not monotonic.