Designing Dielectric Nanostructures using Numerical Simulations for Reducing Optical Losses

Anti-reflection coatings (ARCs) are used in a variety of structures and devices including windows, lenses, and solar energy conversion devices with a view to minimizing the optical losses. Nanostructured dielectric materials can function as a cheaper and even more efficient alternative to multilayer ARCs. Nevertheless, development of nanostructures for this purpose relies heavily on the ability to find suitable geometries, crystalline nature, feature dimensions and pore structure. Evaluating all materials parameters experimentally and successfully identifying the optimal structure are generally cumbersome. Finite Difference Time Domain simulations can be used to understand the light matter interactions and design desired nanostructures easily; however, a gap is commonly found between experimental and simulation results. In this presentation, we discuss the results of our study on oxide nanotubes using FDTD simulation. We took into account the scattering process in these nanomaterials and obtained results matching closely with those obtained experimentally. Our approach can be extended to other morphologies and employed to develop novel cost-effective coatings for reducing the losses due to light reflection.