First-principle approach to dielectric behavior of nonspherical cell suspensions - art. no. 012903

We present a theoretical study of the dielectric behavior of cell suspensio ns by employing the Bergman-Milton spectral representation of the effective dielectric constant. By means of the spectral representation, we derive th e dielectric dispersion spectrum in terms of the electrical and structure p arameters of the cell models. Our results show that a better agreement with the experimental data can be obtained, provided that we introduce a conduc tivity contrast t = sigma (2)/((sigma (2) -sigma (1)). We find that the con ductivity of the cell cytoplasm sigma (1) can be much larger than that of t he suspending medium sigma (2), in contrast to the previous claim that sigm a (1)approximate to sigma (2).