Huge light scattering from active anisotropic spherical particles

The light scattering by a spherical particle with radial anisotropic permittivity mu and permeability m are discussed in detail by expanding Mie theory. With the modified vector potential formulation, the electric anisotropy effects on scattering efficiency are addressed by studying the extinction, scattering, absorption and radar cross sections following the change of the transverse permittivity epsilon(t), the longitudinal permittivity epsilon(r) and the particle size q. The huge scattering cross sections are shown by considering the possible coupling between active medium and plasmon polaritons and this will be possible to result in spaser from the active plasmons of small particle. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America