New features in the transmission of light through thin metal films with randomly rough surfaces

Studies the scattering of p-polarized light from, and its transmission through, a thin, free-standing metal film, whose illuminated face is a one-dimensional, randomly rough vacuum-metal interface, while the back face is a planar metal-vacuum interface. In the absence of the roughness the film supports two surface plasmons at the frequency ω of the incident light, whose wavenumbers can be denoted by q₁(ω) and q₂(ω). The film under study is sufficiently thin that the two surface plasmon polaritons that it supports in the absence of roughness have distinct wave numbers. The angular dependence of the intensity of the incoherent component of the transmitted light displays satellite peaks at angles of transmission that are related to the angle of incidence