Laboratory simulation and modeling of size, shape distributed interstellar graphite dust analogues: A comparative study

The computation of the light scattering properties of size and shape distributed interstellar graphite dust analogues using discrete dipole approximation (DDA) is presented. The light scattering properties of dust particles of arbitrary shapes having sizes ranging from 0.5 to 5.0 μm were computed using DDSCAT 7.3.0 software package and an indigenously developed post-processing tool for size and shape averaging. In order to model realistic samples of graphite dust and compute their light scattering properties using DDA, different target geometries were generated to represent the graphite particle composition in terms of surface smoothness, surface roughness and aggregation or their combination, for using as the target for DDSCAT calculations. A comparison of the theoretical volume scattering function at 543.5 nm and 632.8 nm incident wavelengths with laboratory simulation is also presented in this paper.