NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nano Energy, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2019.01.074

Superlattice photonic crystals (SPhCs) possess considerable potentials as building blocks for constructing high-performance devices because of their great flexibilities in optical manipulation. From the prospective of practical applications, scalable fabrication of SPhCs with large-area uniformity and precise geometrical controllability has been considered as one prerequisite but still remains a challenge.

Recently, Lei Group developed an anodic aluminum oxide template-guided approach to realize Ni SPhCs with the maximum area (~500  mm²). By virtue of the dual-pore self-alignment effect arising from the periodic anodization electric fields, uniform structures over large areas were obtained for Ni SPhCs. Meanwhile, the geometrical parameters for every array of nanopores in terms of pore depth, size, and morphology can be independently controlled due to the sequential pore-opening, thus leading to omnidirectional stably-strong (~95%) light absorption spectra. Optical simulations elucidated that surface plasmon resonance and cavity resonance are responsible for the superior light trapping. Notably, the fabrication technique is applicable to Ni SPhCs with different periodicities, leading to spectrally programmable light absorption spectra. With Ni SPhCs as solar absorber, the water evaporation efficiency of a solar steam generation system and the open circuit voltage of a solar thermoelectric generator demonstrated 2.3 and 2.5 times improvement, respectively.

Zhijie Wang (Institute of Semiconductors, CAS, Beijing, China)

doi: 10.1088/1674-4926/40/5/050201