Abstract

Contrary to prevailing belief, the Ewald-Oseen extinction theorem¹ is unrelated to the physical process of extinction of an incident wave in a medium. The apparent cancellation of the incident field in the customary derivation¹ of the theorem is no more than a consequence of the super position principle: within the medium the dipole field must be expressible as the sum of the total field in the medium and of the negative of the incident field. The Ewald-Oseen extinction theorem, including its generalized forms,² belongs both in its formal structure and in its physical content in the family of relations which may be categorized, broadly speaking, with the Huygens principle.

© 1986 Optical Society of America