We consider Fraunhofer diffraction by an ensemble of large arbitrary-shaped screens that are randomly oriented in the plane of a wavefront and have edges of arbitrary shape. It is shown that far outside the main diffraction peak the differential scattering cross section behaves asymptotically as ${\theta }^{-3}$ , where θ is the diffraction angle. Moreover, the differential scattering cross section depends only on the length of the contours bordering the screens and does not depend on the shape of the obstacles. As both strictly forward and total diffraction cross sections are specified by obstacle area only, the differential cross section of size-distributed obstacles is expected to be nearly independent of obstacle shape over the entire region of the diffraction angles.

© 2009 Optical Society of America

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