Light scattering by randomly oriented bispheres

We describe how the T-matrix approach can be used to compute analytically the Stokes scattering matrix for randomly oriented bispheres with touching or separated components. Computations for randomly oriented bispheres with touching components are compared with those for volume-equivalent randomly oriented prolate spheroids with an aspect ratio of 2 and for a single volume-equivalent sphere. We show that cooperative (multiple-scattering) effects can make bispheres more efficient depolarizers than spheroids in the back-scattering direction.