Abstract

Scattering from optical thin films has been studied for many years. With optical surfaces, most of the energy is carried by specular (reflected and transmitted) beams, the amount of absorbed and scattered light being negligible. In another range of applications involving design of light traps, solar collectors, telescope vanes and detectors, industrial paints[1]… multilayered rough surfaces must be considered. In these cases specular fluxes are practically reduced to zero. The aim of this paper is to briefly describe a theoretical tool that permit one to compute scattering from this kind of structures and to show the method used to design highly absorbing components. The results obtained experimentally show that it is possible to strongly increase the performances of standard quality light absorbers, by coating the bare rough black surfaces with a well-designed layer.

© 1998 Optical Society of America