Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2018
For a long time, the dominant scattering theory used in radiative transfer and scattering calculations has been Mie theory, which is the complete solution to the problems of light scattering by single, isotropic, and homogeneous spheres. However, cosmic dust collections show that most of the largest sized interplanetary dust particles may be porous, inhomogeneous, and aggregated and may have quite different scattering properties. Arbitrary configurations of aggregated spheres may provide a reasonable first approximation to realistic light-scattering models of interplanetary dust particles. In the last few decades, progress has been made in developing light scattering theory for interacting spheres, The development of the addition theorems for scalar and vector spherical wave functions (Friedman & Russek, 1954; Stein, 1961; Cruzan, 1962) opened up a new area in the theoretical study of multisphere scattering problems.