Dielectric Behavior of Nonspherical Cell Suspensions

Recent experiments revealed that the dielectric dispersion spectrum of fission yeast cells in a suspension was mainly composed of two sub-dispersions. The low-frequency sub-dispersion depended on the cell length, whereas the highfrequency one was independent of it. The cell shape effect was qualitatively simulated by an ellipsoidal cell model. However, the comparison between theory and experiment was far from being satisfactory. In an attempt to close up the gap between theory and experiment, we considered the more realistic cells of spherocylinders, i.e., circular cylinders with two hemispherical caps at both ends. We have formulated a Green’s function formalism for calculating the spectral representation of cells of finite length. The Green’s function can be reduced because of the azimuthal symmetry of the cell. This simplification enables us to calculate the dispersion spectrum and hence access the effect of cell structure on the dielectric behavior of cell suspensions. PACS Numbers: 82.70.-y, 87.22.Bt, 77.22.Gm, 77.84.Nh Typeset using REVTEX 1