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Updated: Jul 7, 2026

A Sample Preparation Pipeline for Microcrystals at the VMXm Beamline
Published on: June 17, 2021
How big should hexagonal ice crystals be to produce halos?
1NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2880 Broadway, New York, New York 10025, USA. crmim@giss.nasa.gov
Abstract:
It has been hypothesized that the frequent lack of halos in observations of cirrus and contrails and laboratory measurements is caused by small ice crystal sizes that put the particles outside the geometrical optics domain of size parameters. We test this hypothesis by exploiting a strong similarity of ray tracing phase functions for finite hexagonal and circular ice cylinders and using T-matrix computations of electromagnetic scattering by circular cylinders with size parameters up to 180 in the visible. We conclude that well-defined halos should be observable for ice crystal size parameters of the order of 100 and larger and discuss remote-sensing implications of this result.
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