LIGHT-SCATTERING FROM A RANDOMLY ORIENTED ANISOTROPIC LAYER ON A ROUGH-SURFACE

We compute the diffuse light scattering from a thin layer of randomly oriented anisotropic crystallites on a rough metal surface. A thin anisotropic layer can simply represent the anisotropic surface response of a crystal. We find, in particular, that the inhomogeneity of the surface anisotropy is a significant source of cross-polarized light scattering from a smooth polycrystalline surface. For such a surface the cross-polarized scattering that could be due to residual surface roughness is much smaller than that observed in the case of normal incidence on Ag. Our model of surface anisotropy simply accounts for the magnitude of cross-polarized scattering, but it predicts a ratio of ps to sp scattering that does not agree with that of existing experiments.