ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Babinet’s principle and shows how one can obtain results for a polarization, in which the magnetic field has only a z-component, without additional effort. It first recognizes that, because of the linearity of Maxwell’s equations, one can write the solution to the original diffraction problem, in which the incident wave approaches the screen from the left, as the superposition of the solutions of two problems, in each of which the incident wave approaches the screen from both the left and the right. Reflection from the infinite conducting planes corresponds to exactly forward scattering, and can therefore be ignored when one calculates the scattering cross section. The remaining contributions differ only in that electric and magnetic quantities are interchanged.
