Determination of a Small Number of Particles from Photocount Distribution of Scattered Light

Abstract

We suggest and verify a simple inverse solution to the problem of determining the number of scattering particles from deviations of the measured photocount statistics from Bose-Einstein statistics. We also demonstrate that the experimental data are well fitted either by the theoretical photocount distribution corresponding to the log-normal intensity probability distribution, or by the Polya-Aeppli distribution.