Rayleigh-gans-born light scattering by ensembles of randomly oriented anisotropic particles.

A formula for the electromagnetic scattering amplitude is presented. Using the Rayleigh-Gans-Born approximation, we apply it to the alculation of Stokes matrices for ensembles of randomly oriented anisotropic particles. Two types of anisotropy are treated in detail: particles of any shape with a variable scalar refractive index n(r)delta(ij) and spherical particles with a constant tensor refractive index n(ij). For a monodisperse ensemble of the second type, we describe a method of extracting from data a shape parameter gamma. One may be able to generalize this method to yield structural information for a wider class of ensembles.