Light harvesting enhancement using metal nanoparticles

Abstract

Metal nanoparticles are very important for their optical properties when they interact with light. Metal nanoparticles have the ability to confine the collective oscillation of electrons, which is called localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR). In this work, silver nanoparticles have been proposed to enhance light harvesting, which could be useful for different applications. Metal nanoparticles such as gold and silver nanoparticles have the ability to concentrate field in a very small space. In this study, gold and silver nanoparticles optical response was investigated using frequency domain simulation. The resonance wavelength of gold and silver nanoparticles was about 550 nm and 400 nm, respectively. Silver nanoparticles showed better LSPR performance than gold nanoparticles. Therefore, silver nanoparticles were chosen for optical field enhancement. Here silver nanoparticles were placed on a silicon substrate for optical field enhancement. To study the effect of size on the optical response of silver nanoparticles, the optical properties of this structure with different silver nanoparticles diameter values were investigated. Silver nanoparticles with 40 nm diameters showed a better optical response. To study the effect of the distance between silver nanoparticles on the optical response, different gap values were put between silver nanoparticles. The gap value of 4 nm showed a better optical response. The obtained results showed that the localized field is strongly dependent on the metal type, size, and space between nanoparticles. In addition, the optical field concentration can be controlled by tuning the size and space between silver nanoparticles. This will support localized field enhancement. The enhanced localized field will increase the field absorption near the surface, which can be beneficial for energy harvesting applications such as solar cells and detectors