Abstract:
This type of light matter interaction provides enormous amount of information about the matter, which has been the reason for physicists to be fascinated about this interaction. The subject of scattering of light has long and interesting history. Light scattering was a very popular research area in physics laboratories worldwide in the 1920s. The topic was under investigation by Lord Rayleigh in England, [4] Jean Cabannes in Paris, [5] Robert W. Wood in New York, [6] and Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam in the Institute of Physics in Moscow. [7] Breakthroughs started with Lord Rayleigh who tried to explain the reason behind blue colour of sky. [4] Answering that question he came up with the classical theory of light scattering. These days it is well known as Rayleigh scattering, which is the process where the scattered photon and incident photon have same frequency (also known as elastic scattering). However, the first experimental evidence was given Tyndall, who observed that blue light is more strongly scattered than light of lower frequency and also noted that the scattered light was strongly polarized.
