NONLINEAR ELASTIC-SCATTERING OF LIGHT FROM A MICRODROPLET - ROLE OF ELECTROSTRICTIVELY GENERATED ACOUSTIC VIBRATIONS

An attempt is made to account for the experimentally observed nonlinear elastic scattering of light by a micrometer-sized liquid droplet by the following mechanism: electrostriction produces density inhomogeneities, which perturb the morphology-dependent resonances, leading to a reduction in the quality factor Q; the broadened resonance then causes an increase in the effective cross section, which is the average of the actual cross section over the laser profile. We calculated the density fluctuations by analyzing the acoustic modes of the droplet and then used a recently developed formalism to relate these fluctuations to the increase in the width of the resonance. We found that this mechanism fails, by several orders of magnitude, to explain the observation quantitatively, and we suggest alternative mechanisms.