Noble metal nanoparticles supporting tunable Fano resonances for improving plasmonic solar cells

Bill Nguyen

doi:10.17918/etd-7319

Photovoltaic (PV) solar cell research is an increasingly growing field, largely due to the response to climate change. Many resources have been directed towards thin-film research specifically. Historically, thin-films have been held back by their inefficiency when absorbing and converting light. As a result, much thin-film research focuses on the improvement of absorbance efficiency. In particular, the use of nanoparticles supporting localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) in solar cells has been promising. The use of such plasmonic nanoparticles, termed "plasmonic solar cells" (PSCs), exploit the far field scattering and near electric field enhancement properties of nanoparticles in order to trap light and thus increase efficiency. These two key behaviors are strongest in the Fano resonance (FR) region of the spectrum. In this work, we studied Fano resonance that appear on MDM gold-silica-gold nanoparticles in water using scattnlay, a computational Mie theory program. A variety of configurations of MDM nanoparticles were analyzed for their far field efficiencies, Fano resonance, scattering behavior, near field enhancement, and power flow. Overall, results were found consistent with other studies. The Fano resonance occurs as a result of the interaction between the metal core and outer metal shell. The MDM nanoparticles were found to support Fano resonances for most cases, except for when the core-shell interaction was weak or when the core-shell energy modes did not spectrally overlap. The Fano resonance affected the response of the nanoparticles to radiation. For the far field, the Fano resonance was found to create local minima and maxima in the asymmetry parameter spectrum that favored forward scattering. In the near field, the Fano resonance was found to correspond to behaviors in the field enhancement. The FR center and maximum were found to correspond to the maximum field enhancement at the surface of the metal core and outer shell, respectively. In both cases, the MDM nanoparticles showed improvements over their monometallic counterparts. In addition, the presence of inward optical vortices was found to exist near the LSPR frequency. It was concluded that a plasmonic solar cell configuration exploiting far field scattering properties would likely yield the best improvements; they exhibit preferential forward scattering in a high-scattering region. The MDM nanoparticles could be tuned to the full solar spectrum, scattering light forward and trapping light inside the solar cell.

Noble metal nanoparticles supporting tunable Fano resonances for improving plasmonic solar cells

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Noble metal nanoparticles supporting tunable Fano resonances for improving plasmonic solar cells

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