Wave scattering from a circular cylinder coated with an inhomogeneous plasma at oblique incidence

The scattered fields of a plane wave incident obliquely upon an infinite conducting cylinder enveloped in a radially inhomogeneous plasma sheath are determined by the stratification technique. A transmission-coefficient matrix is introduced for each layer, so that the tangential field components at any interface can be related to those at any other interface by a composite matrix through chain multiplication. It is then not necessary to deal either with summations of the solutions of mathematically untractable coupled second-order differential equations with variable coefficients or with the simultaneous solution of many equations representing the boundary conditions at the interfaces. The computation procedure is much simplified, despite the fact that, at oblique incidence, the axial components of the electric and magnetic fields are coupled. Numerical results are obtained for the back-scattering cross-section as a function of the plasma electron-density profile, the plasma thickness, the direction of incident-wave polarisation, and the angle of incidence.