The physical optics method in electromagnetic scattering

The purpose of this work is to analyze the physical optics method as applied to electromagnetic scattering theory and to point out its physical and mathematical drawbacks. The main conclusions are (1) that the boundary values assumed by physical optics lead to electromagnetic fields that do not satisfy the finiteness of energy condition and, as a consequence, that integral representations of these fields cannot be obtained via the divergence theorem; (2) that the commonly accepted representations are not solutions of the physical optics problem because they fail to reproduce the assumed discontinuities of the fields on the scatterer. Despite the above conclusions, the present work should not be construed as an attempt to discredit the method but rather as an effort toward a better understanding of it. As it is well known, there have been a number of occasions in which physical optics has yielded quite satisfactory results.