Nearly non-scattering electromagnetic wave set and its application

TL;DR

This paper constructs nearly non-scattering electromagnetic wave sets for inhomogeneous media, enabling applications like shadowless lamps by carefully designing sources to minimize shadows during surgery.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to generate nearly non-scattering EM waves for arbitrary inhomogeneous media, with and without conducting coatings, based on Maxwell-Herglotz approximations.

Findings

Existence of infinite nearly non-scattering wave sets for inhomogeneous media.

Characterization of these wave sets with sharp estimates.

Application to designing shadowless surgical lamps.

Abstract

For any inhomogeneous compactly supported electromagnetic (EM) medium, it is shown that there exists an infinite set of linearly independent electromagnetic waves which generate nearly vanishing scattered wave fields. If the inhomogeneous medium is coated with a layer of properly chosen conducting medium, then the wave set is generated from the Maxwell-Herglotz approximation to the interior PEC or PMC eigenfunctions and depends only on the shape of the inhomogeneous medium. If no such a conducting coating is used, then the wave set is generated from the Maxwell-Herglotz approximation to the generalised interior transmission eigenfunctions and depends on both the content and the shape of the inhomogeneous medium. We characterise the nearly non-scattering wave sets in both cases with sharp estimates. The results can be used to give a conceptual design of a novel shadowless lamp. The crucial ingredient is to properly choose the source of the lamp so that nearly no shadow will be produced by the surgeons operating under the lamp.