ABSTRACT
An electromagnetic wave propagating through a cloud of very small particles ( say dust/sand )
experiences extinction ( absorption and scattering ) .The size of these particles is normally less
than 0.2 mm ( in radius ), much smaller than the microwave wavelength,therefore it is possible
to avoid laborious computation by using approximations . Not only are these considerably
simpler than existing solutions ( e.g. for the sphere ) but they can often provide useful physical
insight into the processes occurring . In this paper we have checked the Rayleigh theory (
Rayleigh scatterer ) against a full solution of Maxwell's time-varying fields equations through a
point matching technique ( PMT ) and the agreement between PMT and Rayleigh
approximations for small particles is found to be good .