<title>Strong Absorption Of Light By Multilayer Dielectric-Metal Structures</title>

Abstract

We present here an analysis of plane-wave absorption by a slightly lossy two-layer dielectric structure backed by a metal plate. It is shown first that there exists a close relationship between the guiding characteristics of the two-layer dielectric structure and the total absorption of a plane wave coupled by a prism into the lossy dielectric waveguide. On the basis of known surface-wave characteristics, a parametric study on the plane-wave absorption by the waveguide is carried out and the results show that such a waveguide structure can be used for the design of angularly selective polarization-independent optical absorbers or TM-polarized optical absorbers with a relatively large range of incident angle.