The Wavelength Dependence of Scattered Light Intensity in Rabbit Corneas

It is well known that the almost lossless transmission of light through normal mammalian corneas, an obvious fact, requires a theoretical explanation. The reason for this is the pronounced scattering one would expect if the spatial arrangement of the large number of long transversely submicroscopic fibrils that exist in the stroma were purely random. In a recent theory it was shown that the high corneal transparency can be quantitatively well explained if the fibril arrangement can be described in terms of distorted lattices. One conclusion of this theory is that the ratio of scattered light intensity to incident light intensity in the stroma should be inversely proportional to the fifth power of the light wavelength. In the present work this ratio has been measured for 12 rabbit corneas as a function of the wavelength in the range 3900 to 7250 Å. The results are in very good agreement with the theoretical prediction.