A comparative study of processing simulated and experimental data in elastic laser light scattering

The intensity of the laser light scattered by a suspension of biological particles undergoing Brownian motion contains information about their size distribution function and optical properties. We used several methods (implemented in MathCAD programs), including a new one, to invert the Fredholm integral equation of the first kind, which represents the angular dependence of the elastic scattering of light. The algorithms were first tested on different sets of simulated data. Experimental data were obtained using biological samples and an experimental arrangement which are briefly described. We study the stability of the inversion procedures relative to the noise levels, and compute the first two moments of the retrieved size distribution function. A comparison of the results corresponding to simulated and experimental data is done, to select the best processing algorithm.