FDTD Analysis of Light Propagation in the Human Photoreceptor Cells

This paper presents a numerical study of light interaction with the human retinal photoreceptor. The photoreceptors, cells in the retina responsible for monochromatic vision and color discrimination, differ in shape and size. The cell type (rod or cone) and the variety among the cone cells (S, M, and L) condition their peak absorption wavelength (blue, green, or red). In our work, we observe the outersegment of the photoreceptor as a micro-size optical filter by modeling its interaction with the light wave. Our finite-difference time-domain results suggest that the physical structure of the photoreceptor outersegment can affect its filtering properties.