Light absorption by weakly rough metal surfaces

TL;DR

This paper presents a perturbative approach to analyze light absorption in weakly rough metal surfaces, revealing how surface roughness influences absorptance and can cause sample-to-sample variations in dielectric properties.

Contribution

The study introduces a systematic perturbative method to calculate absorptance in weakly rough metals, highlighting the role of roughness-induced volume effects and explaining observed dielectric variations.

Findings

Roughness can increase absorptance even with smaller amplitudes.

Absorptance variations are mainly due to increased effective absorption volume.

Sample-to-sample dielectric variations may stem from surface roughness effects.

Abstract

We study light absorption by weakly rough metal surfaces with the roughness amplitude and correlation length smaller than the skin depth in metal. We develop a systematic perturbative approach for calculation of the absorptance in such systems and find that roughness-related absorptance variations are determined by an interplay between several system parameters which can result, in particular, in a greater absorption for smaller roughness amplitudes. We show that, for small-scale roughness, the absorptance variations are mainly caused by roughness-induced increase in effective volume of the surface layer, in which the incident light is predominantly absorbed. We argue that such absorptance fluctuations between different samples, even though not related to any electron scattering processes, can appear as sample-to-sample variations of the Drude scattering rate reported in recent measurements of the metal dielectric function.