Light scattering by correlated disordered assemblies of nanoantennas

Optical nanoantennas are widely used to build absorbing metasurfaces with applications in photodetection, solar cells, and sensing. Most of the time, the nanoantennas are assembled as a periodic distribution, but there have been various works where disordered arrays are used, either to get rid of diffraction orders or due to a fabrication process that prevents any determined distribution. Here, we investigate both theoretically and experimentally the unavoidable scattering introduced by such disorders. By introducing a perturbation on the positions of 1D arrays of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) nanoantennas, the light is scattered rather than increasingly absorbed. The scattering occurs only in the plane of incidence and on a given spectral range. We show how this scattering can be manipulated from 0% to 55% of the incoming light.