The effect of absorption on light filtering in randomly layered dielectric systems

We study the effect of absorption on the transmission of light in a system of randomly distributed dielectric layers having identical optical length. In such systems, resonant transmission peaks have been obtained at wavelengths corresponding to multiples of the optical length. The absorption is found to leave the width of these peaks almost unaffected, while it substantially reduces the intensity of the transmitted light. Thus the high resolution is not destroyed by absorption, so this device remains a good potential candidate for use in light filtering compared to existing filters.