Spherical-multipole analysis of an arbitrarily directed complex-source beam diffracted by an acoustically soft or hard circular cone

Abstract

An analytical approach to analyze the diffraction of an arbitrarily directed complex-source beam (CSB) by an acoustically soft or hard semi-infinite circular cone is presented. The beam is generated by assigning a complex-valued location to a point source; its waist and direction are defined by the real and imaginary parts of the source coordinate, respectively. The corresponding scalar boundary-value problem is solved by a spherical-multipole analysis. The solution requires the calculation of associated Legendre functions of the first kind for complex-valued arguments which turns out to be a non-trivial task. Beside a numerical analysis of the corresponding algorithms we present numerical results for the total near- and scattered far-fields.