Molecular light scattering—A spherical tensor approach

Abstract

Recent spherical tensor treatments of the interaction of molecules with static electric and magnetic fields are extended to include dynamic fields. A semi-classical description of molecular light scattering is developed, using spherical tensor methods throughout. The incident and scattered waves are expressed in terms of vector multipole fields, while the dynamic response of the molecule to the incident radiation is characterized by rotationally irreducible distortion tensors. The properties of these dynamic distortion tensors and their relation to their analogues in the conventional cartesian treatment are discussed.