Tailoring disordered structures for light management

In the efforts to enhance absorption in thin film solar cells, a plethora of scattering surface textures for enhancing light incoupling and light trapping has been explored. One consistent finding in many different studies is the fact that employing disorder can be beneficial by virtue of inducing a more broadband response. However, not all disordered structures are equivalent. Disorder may also enhance light scattering within the escape cone, which in turn result in less absorption. Obtaining the most out of introducing disorder therefore requires care, a challenge also encountered in other applications. Even more troubling, optimizing disordered light scattering textures is a major design challenge, especially due to the requirement to consider an extended spatial domain when modelling them. Here, we give an overview of our efforts in tackling these challenges. We present a semi-analytical perturbative method based on Green’s function for cost efficient forward and inverse modelling of quasi-periodic and disordered surface textures. Our formalism side-steps typical shallow amplitude limitations by appropriate choice of the reference structure. We further present a bottom-up self assembled fabrication method for disordered interfaces, which allow indirect tuning of the scattering properties by controlling the building blocks’ geometrical parameters.