Volume scattering of particles by beams carrying orbital angular momentum

In recent years the study of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light has gained traction for applications of remote sensing in underwater environments. When a laser beam propagates through turbid water, the dominant form of attenuation is scattering by large particles relative to visible wavelengths. The volume scattering function (VSF) describes the intensity distribution of light versus angle from an infinitesimal volume of scatterers. Recent computational studies have suggested that the distribution of scattered light due to a single scattering particle differs depending on whether the light is encoded with OAM or not. Other computational studies suggest that these differences are minimized when a volume of particles is illuminated. However, none of these computational projects provide experimental evidence to validate their predictions. This paper sets out to determine the experimental behavior of the VSF in the single scattering regime with and without OAM encoding on the transmitted beam. The experimental results are directly compared to Mie theory and a mixed numerical and analytical method.