Scaling of light scattered from fractal aggregates at resonance

Abstract

Due to the scale invariance of fractal aggregates, light scattered from them often decays as a power of the scattering wave vector. The exponent in this power law has been usually interpreted as the geometrical fractal dimension. However, the validity of this interpretation is questionable for frequencies close to the resonances of the system, for which multiple scattering becomes important. In this work we calculate the dipole moments optically induced in fractal aggregates and the corresponding self-consistent field, as well as the electromagnetic normal modes. To this end, we develop a multiresolution hierarchical representation of the aggregate that allows the study of large systems taking fully into account the long range of the interactions. We analyze the scaling properties of the dynamically induced dipolar distribution. We find that under resonant conditions, scaling with the geometric fractal dimension is only observed for systems much larger than a length scale that is related to the linewidth of each individual resonance. The relevance to this result for the interpretation of light scattering experiments is discussed.