ИСТИНА

In this work, we explore the information content in the diffraction pattern typically obtained from a dilute suspension of red blood cells (RBC) in ektacytometry. In the condition of shear flow the RBC are shear deformed, which implies that the shape of the diffraction pattern resembles the average shape of the cells. However the distribution in sizes and in shapes of the particles reduces the visibility of the diffraction extrema. Considering that RBC become deformed only after the shear stress exceeds a certain level (shear yield) and that, in addition, RBC are often modeled by equivolume spheres, in this work, we estimate the contrast (visibility) of the diffraction pattern as a function of relative variation of particle sizes. In our previous work, the particles were modeled by homogeneous flat disks oriented perpendicular to the laser beam. We showed that this dependency is monotonic in the case that the relative spread of particle sizes is below 0.17. In this work, we calculate a similar dependency assuming the particles to be spherical in shape. We analyze such dependencies obtained numerically for different size distributions of the optically soft spheres.