Transparency of the cornea of the eye using photonic band structure methods

Summary form only given. The explanation of transparency in the cornea and opacity in the sclera (the white of the eye) has been debated for many years. In this first application of photonic band structure methods to biological systems, eye tissue is modeled as an ordered array of collagen rods embedded in a water-based background. Although the cornea is not perfectly ordered, and the sclera is appreciably disordered, the use of periodic models for which Maxwell´s equations can be solved exactly gives a physical understanding that is both clearer and more soundly based than considering the scattering from a single fiber as the basic building block of a theory, because of the difficulty of combining those single-particle-scattering fields in ways that adequately preserve their interference effects.