Determination of Small Number of Particles from Photocount Distribution of Scattered Light

Abstract

In this contribution we suggest and verify a simple inverse solution for the problem of determining the number of scattering particles from deviations of the actual photocount statistics from the Bose-Einstein statistics.(For a general formulation of the problem and reviews, see refs. 1–3.) For this we make a fit of the experimental photocount distribution with the theoretical photocount distribution corresponding to log-normal intensity fluctuations, provided that particle fluctuations are Poissonian. Then we use the first three moments to determine the number of scattering particles in a simple way. In addition, we also demonstrate a possibility of making a good fit of the measured experimental data with the generalized Polya-Aeppli distribution; however, in this case we have found no direct way of obtaining the number of scattering particles.