Mulitlayered Nanostructured Broad Band Absorber

Wasted energy in the form of heat is perhaps the largest source of lost energy making many power systems inefficient. Systems designed to convert heat into useful energy need a method of collecting the heat. We previously described a multilayer design with successive thin metallic and dielectric (non-metal and transparent) layers, where each successive metallic layer absorbs a small fraction of the radiation. However, the regular thickness of the dielectric layer causes reflection peaks, or regions where no absorption occurs. In this work we describe a similar design where we eliminated the undesirable reflection peaks using varying thicknesses of the dielectric layer.