Retroreflection from Nanoporous InP

Abstract

Pronounced retroreflection behavior is reported for a fishnet nanoporous strongly absorbing semiconductor material. Retroreflection appears with diffusive specular reflection for all angles of incidence. Retroreflection is apparent by the naked eye with day light illumination and exhibits no selectivity with respect to wavelength and polarization of incident light featuring minor depolarization of retroreflected light. The phenomenon can be classified neither as coherent backscattering nor as Anderson localization of light. The primary model includes light scattering from strongly absorptive and refractive super-wavelength clusters existing within the porous fishnet structure. We found that retroreflection vanishes for wavelength where absorption becomes negligible.