Rayleigh scattering of a spherical sound wave.

Acoustic Green's functions for a homogeneous medium with an embedded spherical obstacle arise in analyses of scattering by objects on or near an interface, radiation by finite sources, sound attenuation in and scattering from clouds of suspended particles, etc. An exact solution of the problem of diffraction of a monochromatic spherical sound wave on a sphere is given by an infinite series involving products of Bessel functions and Legendre polynomials. In this paper, a simple, closed-form solution is obtained for scattering by a sphere with a radius that is small compared to the wavelength. Soft, hard, impedance, and fluid obstacles are considered. The solution is valid for arbitrary positions of the source and receiver relative to the scatterer. Low-frequency scattering is shown to be rather sensitive to boundary conditions on the surface of the obstacle. Low-frequency asymptotics of the scattered acoustic field are extended to transient incident waves. The asymptotic expansions admit an intuitive interpretation in terms of image sources and reduce to classical results in appropriate limiting cases.