In this paper, the possible realization of the electromagnetic (EM) absorber as a thin metasurface is considered. The metasurface is based on establishing a passive surface of electric and magnetic currents using the Huygen’s principle. So, the absorber is named Huygens Absorber (HA). The metasurface can be designed using split meander lines with spiral rings. In this way, both sides of the sub...

ELECT Three different metamaterial absorbers based on ultra-thin multi-layer structures, with different bandwidth characteristics, are presented. The proposed structure is composed of three vertically stacked metaldielectric layers backed by a metal ground. All the metallic patches are of crossed dipole shape and have different geometrical dimensions, which can be manipulated to design triple-b...

Efficient photocatalytic water splitting requires effective generation, separation and transfer of photo-induced charge carriers that can hardly be achieved simultaneously in a single material. Here we show that the effectiveness of each process can be separately maximized in a nanostructured heterojunction with extremely thin absorber layer. We demonstrate this concept on WO3/BiVO4+CoPi core-s...

The in-situ dissolution-and-reduction CVD synthesized few-layer graphene on ultra-thin nickel catalyst film is demonstrated at temperature as low as 550 °C, which can be employed to form transmission-type or reflection-type saturable absorber (SA) for mode-locking the erbium-doped fiber lasers (EDFLs). With transmission-type graphene SA, the EDFL shortens its pulsewidth from 483 to 441 fs and b...

Micro-perforated absorber is a newly developed sound absorber, and it has a number of attractive features: • Unlike conventional perforated absorbers, micro-perforated absorber can be made from transparent materials like plastic glass. • Unlike commonly used fibrous absorptive materials, micro-perforated absorber is fibrous-free and thus, there is no health concern. • Micro-perforated membranes...

Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope observations of the redshifted 21cm line absorber against the z em = 0.871 double lobed quasar 3C196 show that the intervening absorber is an L ≈ L * spiral galaxy (3C196-G1) and that the absorbing layer of cold gas extends to radii of at least 30 h −1 50 kpc. The new data solve several long standing puzzles about this system by (1) discovering a second 21cm...

Using soft-imprint nanolithography, we demonstrate large-area application of engineered two-dimensional polarization-independent networks of silver nanowires as transparent conducting electrodes. These networks have high optical transmittance, low electrical sheet resistance, and at the same time function as a photonic light-trapping structure enhancing optical absorption in the absorber layer ...

Thick wafer-silicon is the dominant solar cell technology. It is of great interest to develop ultra-thin solar cells that can reduce materials usage, but still achieve acceptable performance and high solar absorption. Accordingly, we developed a highly absorbing ultra-thin crystalline Si based solar cell architecture using periodically patterned front and rear dielectric nanocone arrays which p...

Device modeling and simulation studies of a Cu(In1-x,Gax)Se2 (CIGS) thin film solar cell have been carried out. A variety of graded band-gap structures, including space charge region (SCR) grading, back surface region grading, and double grading of the CIGS absorber layer, are examined. The device physics and performance parameters for different band-gap profiles were analyzed. Based on the sim...

A co-solvent, dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), is added to the aqueous chemical "bath" deposition (CBD) process used to grow ZnOS buffer layers for thin film Cu2ZnSnSe4 (CZTSe) solar cells. Device performance improves markedly as fill factors increase from 0.17 to 0.51 upon the co-solvent addition. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses are presented for quasi-in situ CZTSe/CBD-ZnOS interface...