| From microbiology to astrophysics, the scientific community has long embraced elastic light scattering from small particles as a diagnostic tool. Elastic light scattering has an extremely large scattering cross-section, allowing for single particle interrogation. This is critical in applications where trace amounts of suspect particles are to be detected in a diverse background of natural aerosols. By angularly-resolving the elastically scattered light, features can be detected in these patterns that are sensitive to a particle's morphology (shape, size, internal structure, and composition).; An apparatus to collect LA TAOS (Large-Angle Two-dimensional Angular Optical Scattering) patterns from single particles in-situ and in real-time was designed and constructed. The setup utilizes a cross-beam trigger system to minimize the effects of the aberration coma stemming from the main collection optic, an ellipsoidal mirror. LA TAOS patterns of ambient aerosols were collected and analyzed. Approximately 15% of the ambient aerosol had a sphere-like shape. The refractive index of these spheres was estimated by curve-fitting to Lorenz-Mie theory. In addition, the island features prevalent in the LA TAOS pattern were analyzed. Metrics generated from these were used to get partial discrimination between clusters of Bacillus subtilis spores (a simulant for anthrax) and aerosol particles found in the ambient atmosphere. A novel experimental setup for collecting simultaneously LA TAOS patterns at two wavelengths in the mid-infrared was also implemented. With this setup, the relative strength of single-particle absorption could be discerned at the two illuminating wavelengths. |
