ABSTRACT
This chapter considers one more type of light-matter interaction, namely the passage of a wave through a static medium, confined to some volume in space and scattered sufficiently far from it. The scattering medium may be a single particle or their collection in which the optical properties of individual members might be deterministic or random. So far the theories of scattering for scalar and electromagnetic stochastic fields from deterministic and random media have been formulated within the validity of the first-order Born approximation. Linear treatments allow for determining the changes in spectrum, coherence and polarization of fields produced as a net effect of their propagation from the source to the scattering volume, interaction with the scatterer, and propagation from the scatterer to the far field. Scattering matrix is a linear transformation of the wave incident on a physical system into the scattered wave.
