A numerical investigation of broadband absorption of TE-polarized wave in photonic hypercrystal

Abstract

In this study, we numerically investigated the absorption properties in one-dimensional photonic hypercrystal (PHC), which was consisted of a periodically alternating layers of hyperbolic metamaterial and dielectric material. The first layer of the unit cell of the PHC is a hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM), which made of the two-dimensional square lattice arrangement of gold (Au) nanowire embedded in indium tin oxide (ITO) host and the second layer is the same dielectric material used in metamaterial system. First, the nanowire array hyperbolic metamaterial was designed for providing high extinction coefficient in visible light to near infrared region by optimizing the radius of each Au nanowires. Then, a transfer-matrix method (TMM) was used as the numerical tool for calculating the absorption spectrum of the PHC for both TE- and TM-polarization. The numerical results showed that the PHC structure provides the widest absorption spectrum in the range of 500 to 1,000 nm for TE-polarized wave incidence. The bandwidth of interesting absorption spectrum is increased when increasing the layer thickness of the composed dielectric material. The level of absorbance of PHC is enhanced by increasing the number of periods. Conversely, the absorbance of PHC structure is decreased with the greater incident angle. Finally, the fill factor of nanowire hyperbolic metamaterial will make the shifting of absorption spectrum into long-wavelength region when it is decreased. Meanwhile, the absorption of TM-polarized wave in PHC structure is too low when comparing with TE-wave case. Due to the influence of the above parameters on the absorption spectrum for TE-polarized wave, so the PHC may be used as the TE broadband absorber for energy harvesting application. © 2020 SPIE.