Light scattering by homogeneous and layered spheroids: some new approaches

We present new tools designed for a wider application of the spheroidal model of real particles in light scattering and polarised radiative transfer simulations. We briefly describe the main theoretical novations in our solution to the light scattering problems for single homogeneous spheroids that was obtained by using the field expansions in an optimised non-orthogonal spheroidal basis. Our exact solution for spheroids with non-confocal layer boundaries is a theoretical break through. We note our efforts to transform the naturally arising spheroidal T-matrix into the standard spherical one widely used in applications to ensembles of spheroids as well as our modification of the
package CosTuuM used to prepare the optical data on spheroid ensembles with given distributions for polarised radiative transfer simulations. We discuss the applicability range of our tools as well as various ways used by us to reduce the computational time. As the tools can treat scatterers of as large diffraction parameter xa = 2πa/λ as above 300, where a and λ are the major semiaxis and the wavelength, respectively, as an illustration we compare our results with those derived by the Ray Tracing method.