Light scattering by wood fibers

We consider the scattering of light by single wood fibers both theoreticall y and experimentally. We describe the size and the shape distributions and the internal structure and chemical composition of the wood fibers. We have modeled the random shape of the hollow, cylindrical wood fiber by using mu ltivariate lognormal statistics. We have computed wood-fiber absorption and scattering cross sections, asymmetry parameters, and scattering phase matr ices in the ray-optics approximation. Finally, we have provided experimenta l results from angular scattering measurements for wood fibers and present what we believe is the first comparison between these measurements and ray- optics computations for Gaussian random wood-fiber models. In spite of the complicated internal structure of the wood fiber, our model together with t he ray-optics treatment explains the scattering measurements surprisingly w ell. (C) 2001 Optical Society of America.