Single-Step Fabrication of Longtail Glasswing Butterfly-Inspired Omnidirectional Antireflective Structures

Abstract

Most bio-inspired antireflective nanostructures are extremely vulnerable and suffer from complicated lithography-based fabrication procedures. To address the issues, we report a scalable and simple non-lithography-based approach to engineer robust antireflective structures, inspired by the longtail glasswing butterfly, in a single step. The resulting two-dimensional randomly arranged 80/130/180 nm silica colloids, partially embedded in a polymeric matrix, generate a gradual refractive index transition at the air/substrate interface to suppress light reflection. Importantly, the randomly arranged subwavelength silica colloids display even better antireflection performance for large incident angles than that of two-dimensional non-close-packed silica colloidal crystals. The biomimetic coating is of considerable technological importance in numerous practical applications.

Quintic refractive index profile-based funnel-shaped silicon antireflective structures for enhanced photodetector performance

“…The antireflection effect is a crucial property in optoelectronic applications such as solar cells and photodetectors (PDs), as its effect enhances light absorption by reducing the amount of light that is reflected 1 – 4 . Light reflection occurs at the boundary where the refractive index (RI) of a medium changes, with the amount of reflection increasing as the degree of the RI change increases 5 – 7 .…”