So far, the emergence of perfect absorption in a disordered medium at a given wavelength has been limited to specifically designed incoming waves, or the joint use of metasurfaces. By relying on the effects of cooperative scattering, we numerically demonstrate up to $95\%$ of absorption for versatile radiations incident on optimized mixtures of randomly distributed plasmonic and lossless particles. Our simulations show that the power entering the structure is absorbed on extremely short depths, allowing the numerical sample to be of subwavelength thickness. In addition, the design includes the property of spectral selectivity, which has implications for heat transfer technologies.

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• Light propagation in random media
• Light propagation, transmission & absorption
• Plasmonics
• Nanoparticles
• Random & disordered media
• Direct numerical simulations