A reformulated theoretical approach to evaluate radiative properties of randomly oriented aggregates composed of Rayleigh subunits

The aim of this paper is to present a different approach to the problem which can be both physically sound and profitable from the point of view of numerical computations. As a matter of fact, the diagonal Stokes scattering matrix elements for an arbitrarily shaped particle are determined mainly, (Singham and Bohren, 1987), by the incident field and the single scattering contribution from neighboring dipoles. The essence of our formulation is to introduce a firstorder Born approximation for the electric field at the i-th dipole in a collection of Np interacting dipoles belonging to the same aggregate. Our work takes into account the more recent formulation in term of the electric field by Lou and Charalampopoulos (1994), which is demonstrated both to be valid for spherical subunits and to be energetically well-posed.