Thin film photovoltaic (PV) technologies are highly attractive for low-cost solar energy conversion and possess a wide range of potential applications from building-integrated PV generation to portable power sources. Inverted nanocones (i-cones) have been demonstrated as a promising structure for practical thin film PV devices/modules, owning to their antireflection effect, self-cleaning functi...

We use metal-assisted chemical etching (MCE) method to fabricate nanostructured black silicon on the surface of C-Si. The Si-PIN photoelectronic detector based on this type of black silicon shows excellent device performance with a responsivity of 0.57 A/W at 1060 nm. Silicon nanocone arrays can be created using MCE treatment. These modified surfaces show higher light absorptance in the near-in...

We introduce a design strategy to maximize the Near Field (NF) enhancement near plasmonic antennas. We start by identifying and studying the basic electromagnetic effects that contribute to the electric near field enhancement. Next, we show how the concatenation of a convex and a concave surface allows merging all the effects on a single, continuous nanoantenna. As an example of this NF maximiz...

A large area and broadband ultra-black absorber based on microstructured aluminum (Al) doped silicon (Si) films prepared by a low-cost but very effective approach is presented. The average absorption of the absorber is greater than 99% within the wide range from 350 nm to 2000 nm, and its size reaches to 6 inches. We investigate the fabrication mechanism of the absorber and find that the Al ato...

Nanostructured surface possessing ultrahigh adhesion like "gecko foot" or "rose petal" can offer more opportunities for bionic application. We grow flower-like few-layer graphene on silicon nanocone arrays to form graphene nanoclusters, showing robust adhesion. Their contact angle (CA) is 164° with a hysteresis CA of 155° and adhesive force for a 5 μL water droplet is about 254 μN that is far l...

1 Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, 2 Institute for Genomic Biology, 3 Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana –Champaign, IL, 61801 USA ABSTRACT We have created a randomly distributed nanocone substrate on silicon and coated with silver for surface-plasmonenhanced fluorescence detection and cell imaging. We observed three dimensional fluorescenc...

Multiexcitonic transitions and emission of several photons per excitation comprise a very attractive feature of semiconductor quantum dots for optoelectronics applications. However, these higher-order radiative processes are usually quenched in colloidal quantum dots by Auger and other nonradiative decay channels. To increase the multiexcitonic quantum efficiency, several groups have explored p...