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Biology offers a boundless source of adaptation, innovation, and inspiration. A wide range of photosynthetic organisms exist that are capable of harvesting solar light in an exceptionally efficient way, using abundant and low-cost…
The purpose of this work is to look for a practical structure for application of quantum dots (QD) in solar cells in order to enhance sub-band gap photon absorption. We focuse on a stack of strain-compensated GaSb/GaAs type-II QDs. We…
We investigate the process of photon absorption by atoms or molecules shortly interacting with a laser beam in the dipole approximation. Assuming that the interaction time $\tau$ is much smaller than the lifetime of the corresponding…
Reducing device volume is one of the key requirements for advanced nanophotonic technologies, however this demand is often at odds with designing highly absorbing elements which usually require sizeable thicknesses, such as for detector and…
Recent technical and commercial successes of existing thin film solar cell technologies motivates exploration of next-generation photovoltaic (PV) absorber materials. Of particular scientific interest are compounds like CuSbSe$_2$, which do…
Based on the concept of extended particles recently introduced we perform a Gedankenexperiment accelerating single electrons with photons of suitably low frequency. Accounting for relativistic time dilation due to the acquired velocity and…
Theoretical treatments of strong-field physics have long relied on the numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. The most effective such treatments utilize a discrete spatial representation---a grid. Since most…
We report on very high enhancement of thin layer's absorption through band-engineering of a photonic crystal structure. We realized amorphous silicon (aSi) photonic crystals, where slow light modes improve absorption efficiency. We show…
Semiconductor nanowires are attractive for photovoltaic applications because light absorption can be enhanced compared to planar layers due to the more complex coupling of light with wavelength-scale matter. However, experimentally it is…
Silicon photodetectors operating at near-infrared wavelengths with high-speed and high sensitivity are becoming critical for emerging applications, such as Light Detection and Ranging Systems (LIDAR), quantum communications, and medical…
The optical properties of silicon can be greatly tuned by applying strain and opening new perspectives, particularly in applications where infrared is key. In this work, we use a recent model for the indirect light absorption of silicon and…
Absorption measurement is an exceptionally versatile tool for many applications in science and engineering. For absorption measurements using laser beams of light, the sensitivity is theoretically limited by the shot noise due to the…
The photonic density of states (PDS) of the eigen polarizations (EPs) in cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cells are calculated. The exact analytic expressions for the reflection and transmission matrices for the finite thickness CLC layer…
We extend the ideas of the recently proposed perfect lens [J.B. Pendry, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 85}, 3966 (2000)] to an alternative structure. We show that a slab of a medium with negative refractive index bounded by media of different…
Coating and reflecting thin films for energy harvesting purposes are interesting topics in both theoretical and experimental research. The thin film could help to enhance the absorption of the system via its specific optical properties…
It is well-known that water in both liquid and vapor phases exhibits exceptionally weak absorption of light in the visible range. Recent experiments, however, have demonstrated that at the liquid-air interface, absorption in the visible…
We develop a new approach to calculate the obtainable limit of photoconversion efficiency of tandem solar cells (SCs) and applied it to SCs with both vertical and lateral designs at AM0 and AM1.5 conditions. To get the maximum efficiency,…
Slow-light enhanced absorption in liquid-infiltrated photonic crystals has recently been proposed as a route to compensate for the reduced optical path in typical lab-on-a-chip systems for bio-chemical sensing applications. A simple…
A detailed theoretical study of the optical absorption in self-assembled quantum dots is presented in this paper. A rigorous atomistic strain model as well as a sophisticated electronic band structure model are used to ensure accurate…
The improvement of light absorption in Si/BeSe$_{0.41}$Te$_{0.59}$ heterostructures for solar cell applications is studied theoretically. First, using simple approaches we found that light absorption could be improved in a single…