Fast near field calculations in the discrete dipole approximation for regular rectilinear grids

A near-field calculation of light electric field intensity inside and in the vicinity of a scattering particle is discussed in the discrete dipole approximation. A fast algorithm is presented for gridded data. This algorithm is based on one matrix times vector multiplication performed with the three dimensional fast Fourier transform. It is shown that for moderate and large light scattering near field calculations the computer time required is reduced in comparison to some of the other methods. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America