We show that a weakly absorbing, strongly scattering (white) medium can be
made very strongly absorbing at any frequency within its strong-scattering
bandwidth by optimizing the input electromagnetic field. For uniform
absorption, results from random matrix theory imply that the reflectivity of
the medium can be suppressed by a factor ~(l_a/lN^2), where N is the number of
incident channels and l,l_a are the elastic and absorption mean free paths
respectively. It is thus possible to increase absorption from a few percent to
> 99%. For a localized weak absorber buried in a non-absorbing scattering
medium, we find a large but bounded enhancement.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure