Optical Properties of High-Density Dispersions of Particles: Application to Intralipid Solutions

We propose to study the scattering properties of dense distributions of spherical scatterers by resorting to an iterative solution of the Foldy-Twersky equation for the propagation of the coherent field. As a result of the first step of the iterative procedure, the host medium is substituted by an effective medium of complex refractive index to account for the multiple-scattering processes that occur among the particles. Although we truncate the above-mentioned iterative procedure to the second step, the results of our calculations are in excellent agreement with previous experimental results of Zaccanti et al . ("Measurement of optical properties of highdensity media," to be published in Applied Optics) for the scattering coefficient of Intralipid solutions up to a volume density of 15% and show a limited disagreement at a volume density of 22%.