Abstract
We report the fabrication of broadband antireflective silicon (Si) nanostructures fabricated using spin-coated silver (Ag) nanoparticles as an etch mask followed by inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching process. This fabrication technique is a simple, fast, cost-effective, and high-throughput method, making it highly suitable for mass production. Prior to the fabrication of Si nanostructures, theoretical investigations were carried out using a rigorous coupled-wave analysis method in order to determine the effects of variations in the geometrical features of Si nanostructures to obtain antireflection over a broad wavelength range. The Ag ink ratio and ICP etching conditions, which can affect the distribution, distance between the adjacent nanostructures, and height of the resulting Si nanostructures, were carefully adjusted to determine the optimal experimental conditions for obtaining desirable Si nanostructures for practical applications. The Si nanostructures fabricated using the optimal experimental conditions showed a very low average reflectance of 8.3%, which is much lower than that of bulk Si (36.8%), as well as a very low reflectance for a wide range of incident angles and different polarizations over a broad wavelength range of 300 to 1,100 nm. These results indicate that the fabrication technique is highly beneficial to produce antireflective structures for Si-based device applications requiring low light reflection.
Highlights
Silicon (Si) is an important material used for optoelectronic device applications, such as sensors, photodetectors, and solar cells, due to its abundance in the earth's crust, low-cost, and mature fabrication technique [1,2,3,4]
From the SEM images, we estimated that the average distance between the apexes of the Si nanostructures fabricated using Ag ink ratios of 25% and 35% is less than approximately 500 nm, which is appropriate for achieving broadband antireflection according to rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) simulations
The Si nanostructures fabricated using a Ag ink ratio of 25% had an average height of 236 ± 151 nm, which is much lower than that fabricated by Ag ink ratio of 35% (372 ± 36 nm) and 50% (363 ± 25 nm), and resulted in the formation of collapsed nanostructures
Summary
Silicon (Si) is an important material used for optoelectronic device applications, such as sensors, photodetectors, and solar cells, due to its abundance in the earth's crust, low-cost, and mature fabrication technique [1,2,3,4] For these devices, minimizing the light reflection on the surface thereby increasing the light transmission into the device is the key to increase the device performance. We report a simplified fabrication technique for producing antireflective nanostructures having tapered profile on Si substrates without using any lithography steps To achieve this goal, nano-scale silver (Ag) etch masks were formed using spin-coating Ag ink and subsequent sintering process. We found that the fabricated Si antireflective nanostructures have excellent antireflective properties over a wide wavelength range and polarization-independent antireflection properties
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