Characterization of Power Absorption Response of Periodic 3D Structures to Partially Coherent Fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive method to characterize how 3D absorbing structures respond to partially coherent and polarized incident fields, applicable to various materials and useful in thermal and radiative applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to fully characterize the absorption response of 3D structures to partially coherent fields, including partial polarization, using numerical simulations or Energy Absorption Interferometry.

Findings

Method applicable to any 3D material

Characterization via absorbing functions set

Compatible with experimental and numerical approaches

Abstract

In many applications of absorbing structures it is important to understand their spatial response to incident fields, for example in thermal solar panels, bolometric imaging and controlling radiative heat transfer. In practice, the illuminating field often originates from thermal sources and is only spatially partially coherent when reaching the absorbing device. In this paper, we present a method to fully characterize the way a structure can absorb such partially coherent fields. The method is presented for any 3D material and accounts for the partial coherence and partial polarization of the incident light. This characterization can be achieved numerically using simulation results or experimentally using the Energy Absorption Interferometry (EAI) that has been described previously in the literature. The absorbing structure is characterized through a set of absorbing functions, onto which any partially coherent field can be projected. This set is compact for any structure of finite extent and the absorbing function discrete for periodic structures.