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Perovskite solar cells (PSC) have become a growing research interest due to their flexibility, attractive properties, and low production cost. However, the thin-film structure of PSC often results in a not fully absorbed incident light by…
Plasmonics offer an exciting way to mediate the interaction between light and matter, allowing strong field enhancement and confinement, large absorption and scattering at resonance. However, simultaneous realization of ultra-narrow band…
Two different versions of an optical theorem for a scattering body embedded inside a lossy background medium are derived in this paper. The corresponding fundamental upper bounds on absorption are then obtained in closed form by elementary…
Recently it has been proposed that a planar slab of material, for which both the permittivity and permeability have the values of -1, could bring not only the propagating fields associated with a source to a focus, but could also refocus…
The photovoltaic solar cell is a mature technology, with silicon-based technologies deployed at scale, yet current technologies are limited by the Shockley-Queisser thermodynamic limit, known since the early 1960s. The single-junction…
The photoelectric conversion efficiency of a solar cell is dependent on its temperature. When the solar radiation is incident on the photovoltaics (PV) panel, a large portion of it is absorbed by the underlying material which increases its…
Optical absorption plays a central role in optoelectronic and photonic technologies. Strongly absorbing materials are thus needed for efficient and miniaturized devices. There exists, however, a fundamental limit of 50% absorptance for any…
An optical absorption (OA) band of interstitial dichlorine monoxide molecules with peak at 4.7 eV and halfwidth 0.94 eV is identified in F2 laser - irradiated (photon energy=7.9 eV) synthetic silica glass bearing both interstitial O2 and…
Theory of light absorption and circular photocurrent in Weyl semimetals is developed for arbitrary large light intensities with account for both elastic and inelastic relaxation processes of Weyl fermions. The direct optical transition rate…
The absorption spectra of silicon nanowires (SiNW) are calculated using semi-empirical $sp^{3}d^{5}s^{*}$ tight binding (TB) and Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods. The role of diameter, wave function symmetry, strain and…
We have investigated the transport of light through slabs that both scatter and strongly absorb, a situation that occurs in diverse application fields ranging from biomedical optics, powder technology, to solid-state lighting. In…
We establish design principles for light-harvesting antennae whose energy capture scales superlinearly with system size. Controlling the absorber dipole orientations produces sets of `guide-slide' states which promote steady-state…
Reflection and refraction of light can be used to trap small dielectric particles in the geometrical optics regime. Absorption of light is usually neglected in theoretical calculations, but it is known that it occurs in the optical trapping…
We evaluate the limiting efficiency of full and partial solar spectrum harvesting via the process of internal photoemission in Au-semiconductor Schottky junctions. Our results based on the ab initio calculations of the electron density of…
We study the quantum dynamics of a photo-excitation uniformly distributed at the periphery of an extended star network (with $N_B$ branches of length $L_B$). More specifically, we address here the question of the energy absorption at the…
Single-junction photovoltaic cells are considered to be efficient solar energy converters, but even ideal cells cannot exceed the their fundamental thermodynamic efficiency limit, first analysed by Shockley and Queisser (SQ). For moderated…
We propose an efficient plasmonic structure consisting of metal strips and thin-film silicon for solar energy absorption. We numerically demonstrate the absorption enhancement in symmetrical structure based on the mode coupling between the…
I describe a visually engaging experiment to demonstrate the Beer-Lambert law in introductory physics or general science courses. By using diluted tomato juice as a naturally colored absorber and a halogen lamp as a broadband light source,…
Dew-harvesting technology radiatively cools a condenser below the dewpoint to achieve condensation of the water vapor from the atmosphere. Due to its passive nature, this technology has attracted a broad interest, in particular in the…
Assuming the existence of a local, analytic, unitary UV completion in a Poincar\'{e} invariant scalar field theory with a mass gap, we derive an infinite number of positivity requirements using the known properties of the amplitude at and…