Light scattering by polydisperse suspensions of inhomogeneous nonspherical particles.

The extended boundary condition method is used to make angular scattering calculations for a polydisperse suspension of prolate spheroidal particles. To aid in interpretation of the nonspherical results, calculations are also made for spherical particle suspensions. The basic particle models are two-layered approximations of common bacteria. Using a quasi-Gaussian size distribution, changes in the average particle size are found to have the dominant effect on the scattering of a polydisperse suspension. The spherical and prolate spheroidal two-layered results are compared with similar calculations using the Rayleigh-Gans-Debye approximation and to results based on volume-averaged homogeneous models.