On the degrees of freedom of scattered fields

Starting from the observation that fields differing less than a prescribed error cannot be resolved as distinct entities, the degrees of freedom of the scattered field are introduced and then computed. The degrees of freedom are shown to be practically equal to the Nyquist number appropriate to the effective (spatial) bandwidth of the scattered field and to the extension of the observation domain. Accordingly, a finite number of elements of information can be used to determine the scattered field to a prescribed approximation error. It is also shown that the field representation can be made in terms of field values and simple sampling functions, provided that a marginal increase in the approximation error is tolerated. The results not only completely justify the use of sampling interpolation for representing scattering fields, but also demonstrate that such representation is practically an optimal one. An algorithm for the reconstruction of scattered fields, given the maximum allowed error, is then produced