Three potential techniques for texturing commercial multicrystalline silicon solar cells are compared on the basis of reflectance measurements. Wet acidic texturing, which would be the least costly to implement, produces a modest improvement in reflection before antireflection coating and encapsulation, whereas maskless reactive-ion etching texturing, and especially masked reactive-ion etched p...

The fine structure of the wing scale of a Morpho Peleides butterfly was examined carefully, and the entire configuration was completely replicated by a uniform Al(2)O(3) coating through a low-temperature ALD process. An inverted structure was achieved by removing the butterfly wing template at high temperature, forming a polycrystalline Al(2)O(3) shell structure with precisely controlled thickn...

The laser diode facet damage is one of the impeding factors of the high-power laser diode operation. To overcome this restriction laser diode facet coating can be utilized. During the high power operation of the laser diode, it is observed that the single layer anti reflection (AR) coating at the front facet shows optical damage while the multilayer high reflective coating at the back facet rem...

Thermal noise in mirror optical coatings may not only limit the sensitivity of future gravitational-wave detectors in their most sensitive frequency band but is also a major impediment for experiments that aim to reach the standard quantum limit or cool mechanical systems to their quantum ground state. We present the design and experimental characterization of a highly reflecting mirror without...

This study aims to determine the necessity of applying a mirror coating on the side of a truncated solid dielectric CPC (compound parabolic concentrator) since ray tracing analysis has revealed that part of the incoming rays do not undergo total internal reflection, even within the half acceptance angle of the CPC. An experiment was designed and conducted indoors and outdoors to study the effec...

In this work, polyimide (PI) was coated onto an ultrafine gilt molybdenum wire in order to protect the gilt surface and prepare an electrically stable wire mesh material which can be widely used in space. The surface of the PI-coated gilt molybdenum wires was characterized using FTIR, SEM, and EDS. Factors such as temperature stability of the PI coating, mechanical properties of the PI-coated g...

In this paper, a thin-film InP-based solar cell designed and simulated. The proposed InP solar cell has a periodic array of plasmonic back-reflector, which consists of a silver layer and two silver nanowires. The indium tin oxide (ITO) layer also utilized as an anti-reflection coating (ARC) layer on top. The design creates a light-trapping structure by using a plasmonic back-reflector and an an...

To prevent serious electromagnetic interference, a single-layer and double layer wave-absorbing coating employing complex absorbents composed of carbon black with epoxy resin as matrix was prepared. The morphologies of carbon black /epoxy composites were characterized by scanning electron microscope  and atomic force microscope, respectively. The carbon black  particles exhibit obvious polyarom...

A method for reducing the reflections from silicon optics at terahertz frequencies has been investigated. In this study, we used thin films of parylene as an anti-reflection (AR) layer for silicon optics and show low-loss behavior well above 1 THz. Transmittance spectra are acquired on double-sided-parylene-coated, high-resistivity, single-crystal silicon etalons between 0.45 THz and 2.8 THz. M...