Physics Commons^™

Light Scattering From Periodic, Conducting Nanostructures, Wesley Kenneth Mills

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

A material with broadband light absorbing capabilities has the potential for much usefulness in devices such as photovoltaics and thermoelectrics. By energy conservation, a non-transparent material with low reflectance will be highly absorbing. Thus, much research has been devoted to understanding what makes material having low reflectance across a wide wavelength spectrum.

The importance of a material’s electronic structure in determining reflectance is well-established. Current research is revealing the additional importance of surface architecture in the reflective properties of a material. A metasurface is a two-dimentional material with physical features at or smaller than the wavelength of light considered. These …