Light scattering by a multilayered spheroidal particle.

The light scattering problem for a confocal multilayered spheroid has been solved by the extended boundary condition method with a corresponding spheroidal basis. The solution preserves the advantages of the approach applied previously to homogeneous and core-mantle spheroids, i.e., the separation of the radiation fields into two parts and a special choice of scalar potentials for each of the parts. The method is known to be useful in a wide range of the particle parameters. It is particularly efficient for strongly prolate and oblate spheroids. Numerical tests are described. Illustrative calculations have shown that the extinction factors converge to average values with a growing number of layers and how the extinction varies with a growth of particle porosity.