Total absorption of light by a nanoparticle: an electromagnetic sink in the optical regime

In this Letter, we give a general description of the illumination and object properties for obtaining total absorption. We show theoretically and numerically that properly designed sub-100 nm metallic particles are able to absorb all the energy of an incident beam if the latter is adequately shaped. In addition to their interest as absorbers, these particles act as efficient near-field probes as they convert the incident propagating beam into a localized nonradiative field.