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Coatings much thinner than the wavelength of incident light not only suppress reflection from the substrate, but also can absorb almost all of the light, if the optical properties of film and substrate are perfectly matched. This research offers a general strategy to find all suitable film-substrate combinations, and demonstrates that low-loss, epsilon-near-zero substrates like (Al,Zn)O are a promising platform for wavelength-tunable ultrathin-film perfect absorbers, which could serve as alternatives to plasmonic metasurfaces in the near infrared, for example.
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Rensberg et al. (2017) studied this question.
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