Modeling cometary photopolarimetric characteristics with Sh-matrix method

Cometary dust is dominated by particles of complex shape and structure, which are often considered as fractal aggregates. Rigorous modeling of light scattering by such particles, even using parallelized codes and NASA supercomputer resources, is very computer time and memory consuming. We are presenting a new approach to modeling cometary dust that is based on the Sh-matrix technique (e.g., Petrov et al., JQSRT, 112, 2012). This method is based on the T-matrix technique (e.g., Mishchenko et al., JQSRT, 55, 1996) and was developed after it had been found that the shape-dependent factors could be separated from the size- and refractive-index-dependent factors and presented as a shape matrix, or Sh-matrix. Size and refractive index dependences are incorporated through analytical operations on the Sh-matrix to produce the elements of T-matrix. Sh-matrix method keeps all advantages of the T-matrix method, including analytical averaging over particle orientation. Moreover, the surface integrals describing the Sh-matrix elements themselves can be solvable analytically for particles of any shape. This makes Sh-matrix approach an effective technique to simulate light scattering by particles of complex shape and surface structure. In this paper, we present cometary dust as an ensemble of Gaussian random particles. The shape of these particles is described by a log-normal distribution of their radius length and direction (Muinonen, EMP, 72, 1996). Changing one of the parameters of this distribution, the correlation angle, from 0 to 90 deg., we can model a variety of particles from spheres to particles of a random complex shape. We survey the angular and spectral dependencies of intensity and polarization resulted from light scattering by such particles, studying how they depend on the particle shape, size, and composition (including porous particles to simulate aggregates) to find the best fit to the cometary observations.