Excitation of plasmons on the surface of a metal grating placed in planar or conical mounting is investigated in detail. Most of the results of numerical computations are compared with experimental data. When a TM wave illuminates a metal grating, total or partial absorption of incident light occurs at angles of incidence at which the plasmon surface waves are excited. In planar mounting the absorption is generally strong and nearly total absorption is observed. While in conical mounting, it is not so strong as that in the planar mounting case and a considerable amount of incident power is reflected. This, however, is accompanied by enhanced TM-TE mode conversion and the greater part of the reflected wave is in the TE polarization. The reciprocal of the TM-wave efficiency, hence, is a practical measure in finding the angles of incidence at which the plasmons are excited. Because the angles are sensitive functions of the refractive index of a material over the grating surface, this phenomenon can be used as an index sensor.

An accurate and efficient numerical solution is presented for a two-dimensional electromagnetic wave scattering from a multilayered resistive strip grating embedded in a dielectric slab. Both E- and H-waves are treated. The problem is formulated into a set of integral equations, which is solved by the moment method accompanied by a regularization procedure. The resultant set of linear algebraic equations has the form of the Fredholm second kind, and therefore yields stable and accurate numerical solutions. The power distribution is computed for several grating parameters. Attention is paid to seek a set of parameters that maximizes absorption in the strips. The low frequency approximate formulas are also derived. This analysis would be useful in designing electromagnetic wave absorbers.

Field distributions and energy flows of the surface waves excited in singlelayer-overcoated gratings are evaluated in order to investigate the behavior of the resonance absorption in the grating.