Abstract
The authors describe a novel theoretical methodology for the design of multilayer nanostructures that is based upon analytical differentiation of the transfer matrix equations, and demonstrate this methodology provides an efficient route to optimizing the geometries of structures for applications including incandescent light sources, anti-reflective solar coatings, and light-harvesting structures coupled to molecular chromophores.
Highlights
Designing materials on the nanoscale can have a profound impact on how optical energy flows through those materials, which can in turn dramatically improve the performance of nanostructured materials for energy-related applications including solar and thermophotovoltaic energy conversion [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17], radiative cooling [18,19,20,21,22,23], incandescent lighting [24,25,26,27], among others
For application (a), we demonstrate local optimizations of multilayer filters with 90 degrees of freedom, leading to a nearly twofold improvement in luminous efficiency compared to unoptimized filters and nearly a tenfold improvement compared to unfiltered emitters
We have presented a methodology for accelerating the optimization and virtual design of multilayer nanostructures for a variety of photonic and thermal radiation applications
Summary
Designing materials on the nanoscale can have a profound impact on how optical energy flows through those materials, which can in turn dramatically improve the performance of nanostructured materials for energy-related applications including solar and (solar) thermophotovoltaic energy conversion [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17], radiative cooling [18,19,20,21,22,23], incandescent lighting [24,25,26,27], among others. We provide a simple and efficient route to the generation of such gradients through analytic differentiation of the transfer-matrix equations that provides an efficient engine for generating exact gradients for objective functions that derive from optical and/or thermal radiation properties This theoretical advance provides a powerful tool for accelerating the computational design and discovery of multilayer nanostructures for a variety of applications. The resulting methodology is applied to the local optimization of 90-layer filters for incandescent light sources, identifying three different structures with predicted luminous efficiency exceeding 30% This analytic gradient engine is coupled to a basin-hopping algorithm and used to identify globally optimum coatings for thin-film photovoltaic and cavities for enhanced light harvesting. Enabling tool for the design and analysis of multilayer nanomaterials in a number of domains including photonics, materials science, plasmonics, nanoscience, energy research, and chemical physics
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