Presenter: Wesley Mills
Authors: Wes Mills, Christian Lange, T.-C. Shen
Faculty Advisor: T.-C. Shen
Institution: Utah State University
Light scattered from periodic structures generates numerous fascinatingphenomena, from diffraction patterns to the black patches on somebutterfly wings. The simple scalar wave formulation based on Huygensprinciple can account for many diffraction and radiation patterns in the farfield. However, when the structure dimensions are smaller than thewavelength, light polarization and structure details become important, and the vector formulation based on Maxwell's equations is necessary. We willpresent an analytic calculation and a numerical simulation on lightscattering from two-dimensional conducting grids to model the reflectancefrom butterfly wings and broadband absorption structures made from carbonnanotube forests.