Nanophotonics for enhanced solar efficiency, electrostatic screening, and polarization control
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Nanophotonics offers a variety of applications including renewable energy, telecommunication and electronics. This thesis explores optical and electrical aspects of nanophotonic devices in three different areas: enhancing the efficiency of solar cells, controlling electrostatic screening using metamaterials, and manipulating polarization with dielectric chiral metamaterials. As the first area, a combined optical and electrical analysis is developed for nanophotonic solar cells. The analysis is applied to two types nanophotonic structures: nanostructured films and nanowires. Such a combined analysis approach is critical for nanophotonic solar cells as they typically have large absorption enhancement but more recombination losses. This combined analysis determines the current and voltage characteristics simultaneously and computes an upper bound on the efficiency while incorporating the fundamental losses due to Auger and surface recombinations. Moreover, an analytical model is introduced, which simplifies the analysis and is used in place of electrical simulations. The second area investigates electrostatic screening in metamaterials. Electrostatic behaviors of metamaterials have not been studied before, and in order to demonstrate different kinds of electrostatic responses, two classes of metamaterials (cubic arrays and wire media) are studied in the electrostatic limit. While cubic arrays are described by a local dielectric function and have a relative permittivity constant like dielectrics do, wire media are described by a nonlocal dielectric function that gives rise to an exponentially decaying electric potential like in bulk metals. The properties of electrostatic screening in both classes of metamaterials are determined by the geometrical parameters of metamaterials, which shows that metamaterials offer geometrical control of electrostatic screening and, therefore, the Coulomb interaction. In the third area, dielectric helices are shown to exhibit strong circular dichroism and to have polarization stop gaps for light propagating perpendicular to helices. Band structures and reflectance spectra are used to illustrate such effects. Perturbation theory is applied to give a quantitative reasoning of how the effects emerge. These effects enable a practical application as a chiral mirror, which completely reflects normally incident light of one circular polarization while preserving the handedness of polarization.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Karakasoglu, Ilker |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Fan, Shanhui, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Fan, Shanhui, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Harris, J. S. (James Stewart), 1942- |
| Thesis advisor | Vuckovic, Jelena |
| Degree committee member | Harris, J. S. (James Stewart), 1942- |
| Degree committee member | Vuckovic, Jelena |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Ilker Karakasoglu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Ilker Karakasoglu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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