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Omnidirectional absorption in nanostructured metal surfaces

Abstract

Light absorbers available at present provide far from optimal black-body performance. The need for more efficient absorbers is particularly acute on the microscale, where they can play a significant role in preventing crosstalk between optical interconnects, and also as thermal light-emitting sources. Several efforts have been made in this context to achieve near-total but directionally dependent absorption using periodic grating structures1,2,3,4,5,6,7. However, the ability to absorb light completely for any incident direction of light remains a challenge. Here we show that total omnidirectional absorption of light can be achieved in nanostructured metal surfaces that sustain localized optical excitations. The effect is realized over a full range of incident angles and can be tuned throughout the visible and near-infrared regimes by scaling the nanostructure dimensions. We suggest that surfaces displaying omnidirectional absorption will play a key role in devising efficient photovoltaic cells in which the absorbed light leads to electron–hole pair production.

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Figure 1: Total light absorption in nanostructured metal surfaces.
Figure 2: Omnidirectional light absorption.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank V. Popov for valuable suggestions and fruitful discussions. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC), under contract MAT2007-66050, the EU-FP6, under contract NMP4-2006-016881 ‘SPANS’, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant 07-02-91011), and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) NanoPhotonics Portfolio EP/C511786/1.

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Teperik, T., García de Abajo, F., Borisov, A. et al. Omnidirectional absorption in nanostructured metal surfaces. Nature Photon 2, 299–301 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.76

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