Plasmon enhanced broadband optical absorption in ultrathin silicon nanobowl array for photoactive devices applications

Both photonic and plasmonic nanostructures are key optical components of photoactive devices for light harvesting, enabling solar cells with significant thickness reduction, and light detectors capable of detecting photons with sub-band gap energies. In this work, we study the plasmon enhanced broadband light absorption and electrical properties of silicon nanobowl (SiNB) arrays. The SiNB-metal photonic-plasmonic nanostructure-based devices exhibited superior light-harvesting ability across a wide range of wavelengths up to the infrared regime well below the band edge of Si due to effective optical coupling between the SiNB array and incident sunlight, as well as electric field intensity enhancement around metal nanoparticles due to localized surface plasmon resonance. The photonic-plasmonic nanostructure is expected to result in infrared-light detectors and high-efficiency solar cells by extending light-harvesting to infrared frequencies. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.