Light Absorption by a Medium Containing a Multilayered System of Monolayers of Spherical Particles

An approach was developed to describe the optical properties of multilayered systems (multilayers) consisting of monolayers of spherical particles in a light-absorbing medium. It takes into account multiple scattering of waves in individual monolayers and multiple reflections between monolayers. The transmission and reflection amplitude coefficients of the selected layers of light-absorbing medium containing monolayers of particles were determined in the framework of a recently developed method based on utilizing the quasicrystalline approximation. They were used to calculate transmission and reflection coefficients of a multilayer in the framework of the transfer matrix method. The calculated absorption coefficients of a weakly absorbing medium layer containing 1, 4, 8, and 32 monolayers of titanium oxide (TiO₂) particles with an incident plane electromagnetic wave along the normal as applied to the enhancement of photocatalytic reactions in photochemical microreactors were presented.