Digital Commons Network^™

Effective Disorder Strength And Fractal Dimension Of Biologically Relevant Systems, Ethan Ross Avery

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, therefore, in order to properly relate the competition between fractal dimension of a system to its optical scattering properties, and to find the fractal dimension for which maximum scattering occurs, we have performed a systematic characterization of the disorder properties of fractal biological samples with a wide range of fractal dimensions. As cells/tissues are dielectric media, we have indirectly characterize the effective disorder of the fractal media based on their eigenvalues/eigenfunction in a closed-boundary condition using optical waves. We observed a non-monotonous behavior due to the competition between decreases in fractality verses increasing scattering centers.