A Super-Absorbent Solar Material

A Super-Absorbent Solar Material: Atwater worked with Koray Aydin, now an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, to develop the super-absorber design, which takes advantage of a phenomenon called optical resonance. Just as a radio antenna will resonate with and absorb certain radio waves, nanostructured optical antennas can resonate with and absorb visible and infrared light. The length of a structure determines what wavelength of light it will resonate with. So Atwater and Aydin designed structures that effectively have many different lengths: wedge shapes with pointy tips and wide bases. The thin, nanoscale wedges strongly absorb blue light at the tip and red light at the base.

Atwater and Aydin demonstrated this broadband effect in a 260-nanometer-thick film made of a layer of silver topped with a thin layer of silicon dioxide and finished with another thin layer of silver carved with arrays of wedges that are 40 nanometers at their tips.