Two-dimensional Guinier analysis: Application to single aerosol particles in-flight

This work presents an apparatus that measures near-forward two-dimensional elastic scattering patterns of single aerosol particles and proposes a two-angle extension of the Guinier law to analyze these patterns. The particles, which approximately range from 2 to 8 micrometers in size, flow through the apparatus in an aerosol stream. A spatial filtering technique separates the near-forward portion of the patterns from the illumination light. Contours intended to represent the geometrical profile of the particles are generated from the patterns using the extension of the Guinier law. The analysis is applied to spherical and nonspherical particles, and the resulting contours are found to be consistent with particle shape only for spherical particles. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America