The Study of Optical Properties for Ordered and Disordered Silicon Nanowire Structures

TL;DR

This study investigates how ordered and disordered silicon nanowire structures affect optical absorption, revealing that disorder can significantly enhance absorbance, which is promising for solar cell and photodetector design.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comparative analysis of ordered and disordered silicon nanowire structures using FDTD, highlighting the beneficial effects of disorder on optical absorption.

Findings

Disorder structures increase average absorbance of Si nanowires.

Disordered structures exhibit higher electric field path lengths.

Achieved 41.46% average absorbance, up to 78.18%.

Abstract

We designed ordered and disordered silicon (Si) nanowire structures and analyzed their optical performance using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique. We studied the orderness of nanowire structures by calculating scalar variance. This study reveals that utilizing disorder structures can increase the average absorbance of Si nanowire structures. Spatial electric field distributions provided insights into light-matter interaction, indicating that disorder structures had higher path lengths compared to the periodic structure. We achieved an average absorbance of 41.46% for the hyperuniform Si nanowire structure with a maximum absorbance of 78.18%. Intuitively, we obtained ~70% high absorbance compared to periodic Si nanowire structure. Our findings will be conducive to designing new efficient solar cells and photodetectors.