Antireflective structures fabricated from silica nanoparticles with regular arrangement

Abstract

Novel antireflective surfaces with silica particles arranged regularly and tightly are proposed and fabricated by self assemble silica nanoparticle through electrostatic attraction between charged colloidal particles and charged polyelectrolyte multilayer. Due to regularly arrangement of the particles, the nanoparticle coatings, as homogeneous porous layers with uniform distribution, show high-quality and uniform antireflective capability in each region on the substrate. It has been sufficiently demonstrated in our experiments. Furthermore, the relations among the antireflective capability, average size of nanoparticles, and incident angle of the irradiated light are calculated by finite-difference time-domain method. It is demonstrated that the nanostructure coatings with particles of 100 nm size possess the excellently suitable performance for reflection/transmission with respect to visible-light region. From the results, the fabricated anti-reflective nanostructures have great potential to improve the efficiency of optoelectronic devices such as a photo-detector and solar cells.

A novel theoretical method to determine the effective optical properties of high refractive index nanocomposites

“…1 Compared with inorganic optical materials, organic polymers have the advantages of lightweight, good processing properties, good photothermal properties, good color tunability and reasonable cost, 6,7 and are receiving increasing attention in applications such as optical fibers, resin lenses, precision lenses and antireflective coatings. 8,9 Yet existing polymer optical materials do have some drawbacks due to the structural composition, such as poor surface hardness, low refractive index, and poor heat resistance, all of which limit the widespread use of polymers. 10 Therefore, the design of a new polymer material that meets the high refractive index requirements of devices will lead to the development of high-end optical instruments.…”