Inverse Design of Broadband Absorption in the Visible with Plasmonic Multilayered Planar Structures

Abstract

Plasmonic structures based on stacked layers of metal and dielectric materials excel as broadband absorbers because of the nonlinear relationship between the compound materials’ dispersion characteristics and the multilayered structure’s actual performance. In this work, radiation absorption along the plasmonic absorber is studied. Broadband absorptance spectra play an important role in applications such as photovoltaics, detectors, modulators, and emitters. We propose and analyze plasmonic stacked structures that exhibit high broadband absorption. For this purpose, an inverse design approach has been implemented using a conventional genetic algorithm as a global optimizer in conjunction with a pattern search as a local optimizer. The proposed strategy found structures with absorption covering the visible spectrum, maintaining its performance for high incident angles.