Inhomogeneous coatings are promising for superior optical properties, e.g. broadband antireflection, in comparison to conventional HL-stack designs. Although a lot of excellent theoretical work on optical behaviour of rugates and gradient index films has been done during the last decades, there is no real breakthrough in industrial fabrication. The realization of such coatings leads to an exten...

The successful development of multijunction photovoltaic devices with four or more subcells has placed additional importance on the design of high-quality broadband antireflection coatings. Antireflective nanostructures have shown promise for reducing reflection loss compared to the best thin-film interference coatings. However, material constraints make nanostructures difficult to integrate wi...

This data article is related to our recently published article (Hussain et al., in press [1]) where we have proposed a new solar cell model based on n-ZnO as front layer and p-Si as rear region. The ZnO layer will act as an active n-layer as well as antireflection (AR) coating saving considerable processing cost. There are several reports presenting use of ZnO as window/antireflection coating i...

Designs of multilayer antireflection coatings made from co-sputtered and low-refractive-index materials are optimized using a genetic algorithm. Co-sputtered and low-refractive-index materials allow the fine-tuning of refractive index, which is required to achieve optimum anti-reflection characteristics. The algorithm minimizes reflection over a wide range of wavelengths and incident angles, an...

Uncoated surfaces of high index glasses when cemented to form lens doublets have inferior antireflection properties to doublets of low index glass. This can be overcome by the application of a single layer coating of aluminum oxide prior to cementing.

In this study, theoretical and experimental investigations have been carried out to explore the suitability of graphene layers as an antireflection coating. Microwave plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition and chemically grown graphene layers deposited on polished and textured silicon surfaces show that graphene deposition results in a large decrease in reflectance in the wavelength range of...

A solution-grown subwavelength antireflection coating has been investigated for enhancing the photovoltaic efficiency of thin film solar cells. The 100-nm-height ZnO nanorods coating benefited the photocurrent of Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells from 31.7 to 34.5 mA/cm2 via the decrease of surface light reflectance from 14.5% to 7.0%, contributed by the gradual refractive index profile between air and ...

A synthesis design method based on a vibrating search algorithm was proposed to achieve a wide-angle incidence visible antireflection coating design with an incident angle up to 50 above normal using only a two-material multilayer system. We found not only that the search algorithm is straightforward, but also that the resultant wide-angle wideband visible antireflection performance in the desi...

Three potential techniques for texturing commercial multicrystalline silicon solar cells are compared on the basis of reflectance measurements. Wet acidic texturing, which would be the least costly to implement, produces a modest improvement in reflection before antireflection coating and encapsulation, whereas maskless reactive-ion etching texturing, and especially masked reactive-ion etched p...

Broadband antireflection and field emission characteristics of silicon nanopillars (Si-NPs) fabricated by self-masking dry etching in hydrogen-containing plasma were systematically investigated. In particular, the effects of ultrathin (5-20 nm) titanium nitride (TiN) films deposited on Si-NPs by atomic layer deposition (ALD) on the optoelectronic properties were explored. The results showed tha...