Abstract
The surface of a weakly rough metal, with height fluctuations of a few nanometers, can produce remarkably strong and unusual optical effects under appropriate conditions. If the random roughness of a metal surface allows an incident light wave to launch surface plasmon polaritons, the diffuse scatter emitted by the surface will receive contributions when these surface waves are subsequently scattered from the surface. Under such conditions, it has been predicted that effects like backscattering enhancement may appear in the mean diffuse scatter emitted by the surface.1,2 These theoretical works use sophisticated methods to account for multiple scattering processes involving plasmon-polariton excitation. In particular, the incident light wave may be roughness-coupled to surface waves, which may themselves be scattered many times within the surface, to finally be roughnesscoupled out of the surface so as to contribute to the diffusely scattered light. Other theoretical works have used direct perturbation3 or Monte Carlo4 techniques to study such effects. This line of research has been extended to include theoretical studies of angular correlation functions5 and of the generation of diffuse second harmonic light from weakly rough metals.6,7
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O’Donnell, K.A. (2007). Experimental Studies of Scattering from Weakly Rough Metal Surfaces. In: Maradudin, A.A. (eds) Light Scattering and Nanoscale Surface Roughness. Nanostructure Science and Technology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35659-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35659-4_9
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