Polarization of light scattered by large aggregates

TL;DR

This study models light scattering by large cosmic dust aggregates with over 1000 monomers, revealing how their structure influences polarization and aiding interpretation of comet dust observations.

Contribution

Introduces a new parallelized MSTM code to simulate light scattering by large aggregates, linking their porosity and structure to observed polarization characteristics.

Findings

Porous aggregates (>98% porosity) show Rayleigh-like polarization dependence.

Less porous, compact aggregates exhibit solid-particle polarization curves.

Large aggregates can explain both phase angle and wavelength dependence of comet polarization.

Abstract

Study of cosmic dust and planetary aerosols indicate that some of them contain a large number of aggregates of the size that significantly exceeds the wavelengths of the visible light. In some cases such large aggregates may dominate in formation of the light scattering characteristics of the dust. In this paper we present the results of computer modelling of light scattering by aggregates that contain more than 1000 monomers of submicron size and study how their light scattering characteristics, specifically polarization, change with phase angle and wavelength. Such a modeling became possible due to development of a new version of MSTM (Multi Sphere T-Matrix) code for parallel computing. The results of the modeling are applied to the results of comet polarimetric observations to check if large aggregates dominate in formation of light scattering by comet dust. We compare aggregates of different structure and porosity. We show that large aggregates of more than 98% porosity (e.g. ballistic cluster-cluster aggregates) have angular dependence of polarization almost identical to the Rayleigh one. Large compact aggregates (less than 80% porosity) demonstrate the curves typical for solid particles. This rules out too porous and too compact aggregates as typical comet dust particles. We show that large aggregates not only can explain phase angle dependence of comet polarization in the near infrared but also may be responsible for the wavelength dependence of polarization, which can be related to their porosity.