Plasmonic nanoparticles located on the illuminated surface of a solar cell can perform the function of an antireflection layer, as well as a scattering layer, facilitating light-trapping. Al nanoparticles have recently been proposed to aid photocurrent enhancements in GaAs photodiodes in the wavelength region of 400-900 nm by mitigating any parasitic absorption losses. Because this spectral reg...

An efficient antireflection coating is critical for the improvement of silicon solar cell performance via increased light coupling. Here, we have grown well-aligned ZnO nanowhisker (NW) arrays on Czochralski silicon solar cells by a seeding-growth two-step process. It is found that the ZnO NWs have a great effect on the macroscopic antireflection effect and, therefore, improves the solar cell p...

A technique connecting a scalar wide-angle finitedifference beam-propagation method(FD-BPM) with a scalar finite-difference time-domain method (FD-TDM) is systematically described and used to analyze a lensed coreless fiber. The propagating field and its phase distribution are calculated to demonstrate the phase adjustment effect of the lens. The power concentration due to the lens is evaluated...

The mid-infrared transmission through a 3.7 mm period, twodimensional sub-wavelength Au metallic hole array integrated on a GaSb/InAs strained layer superlattice nBn photodetector is measured. The surface plasmon-polariton excitation on the Au film induces a peak transmission in the 200 K detector response at 4.2 mm. This transmission is enhanced threefold by the insertion of a SiNx layer betwe...

In this study, we examined the fine structure of the compound eyes of a household fly and precisely replicated its entire structure using a low-temperature atomic layer deposition technique. The surface of the fly eye is found to be covered by highly packed protuberances, which potentially increases visual efficiency through increased photon capture for a given stimulus. The alumina replica was...

This study compares and quantifies the simulated effects of noise, index errors, and photometric level errors on different optical monitoring layer termination strategies. A computer program to simulate optical thin film monitoring has been written for this work. The study looked at these termination methods: quartz crystal monitoring, photometric level cut, two types of turning point terminati...

We show that a scattering-reduction effect is obtained by coating a rough surface with an antireflection layer. This research is a generalization of Amra's [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 10, 365-374 (1993)] study of smooth surfaces conducted with a first-order theory to the case of rough surfaces. We show that the differential method with the R matrix algorithm can be used to study scattering from multila...