Perturbing beyond the shallow amplitude regime: Green's function scattering formalism with Bloch modes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a computationally efficient Green's function scattering formalism based on Bloch modes for modeling disordered surface textures, capable of handling regimes beyond shallow amplitude disorder and improving light incoupling in solar cells.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel Bloch modes' based formalism that reduces computational costs while accurately modeling scattering beyond shallow disorder regimes.

Findings

Accurately estimates scattering response with fewer plane waves.

Demonstrates improved light incoupling in disordered solar cell textures.

Provides a benchmark showing excellent agreement with more costly methods.

Abstract

We present a Bloch modes' based Green's function scattering formalism for cost efficient forward modelling of disordered binary surface textures. The usage of Bloch modes of an unperturbed reference ordered system as ansatz allows our formalism to address surface scattering beyond the shallow amplitude regime. The main advantage of our formalism is the possibility to utilize a small amount of plane waves to represent the assumed Bloch modes thereby reducing computational costs, while still allowing one to estimate the scattering response to all channels accessible by the disordered system. Benchmarking calculations discussed in the paper demonstrate how the usage of our Bloch modes ansatz provides an excellent estimate of the scattering response over an important regime of disorder. As an example of our method's strength, we examine an electrically decoupled binary light trapping texture and demonstrate how introducing disorder may improve light incoupling into the considered solar cell structure.