Scattering of guided light by a single hole in a dielectric slab

We study the scattering of waveguided light by a single hole in a dielectric slab with FDTD simulations and investigate two scattering processes: two dimensional (2D) scattering into slab modes and three-dimensional (3D) scattering into the surroundings. We find that 2D scattering typically dominates over the 3D losses. We find important quantitative differences between the single hole scattering and the case of scattering from an infinite Mie cylinder. Additionally, we find that a hole cannot be simply modelled as a dipolar object even in the limit of small scatterers (Rayleigh approximation). This is visible from the angular dependence of the 2D scattered intensity. We discuss the relevance of our findings in the modeling of two dimensional random scattering media.