Lo Sciuto Grazia, Napoli Christian, Kowol Paweł, Capizzi Giacomo, Brociek Rafał, Wajda Agata, Słota Damian
Department of Electrical, Electronics and Informatics Engineering, University of Catania, Viale Andrea Doria, 6, 95125 Catania, Italy.
Department of Mechatronics, Silesian University of Technology, Akademicka 10a, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Oct 2;22(19):7486. doi: 10.3390/s22197486.
In order to obtain optimized elementary devices (photovoltaic modules, power transistors for energy efficiency, high-efficiency sensors) it is necessary to increase the energy conversion efficiency of these devices. A very effective approach to achieving this goal is to increase the absorption of incident radiation. A promising strategy to increase this absorption is to use very thin regions of active material and trap photons near these surfaces. The most effective and cost-effective method of achieving such optical entrapment is the Raman scattering from excited nanoparticles at the plasmonic resonance. The field of plasmonics is the study of the exploitation of appropriate layers of metal nanoparticles to increase the intensity of radiation in the semiconductor by means of near-field effects produced by nanoparticles. In this paper, we focus on the use of metal nanoparticles as plasmonic nanosensors with extremely high sensitivity, even reaching single-molecule detection. The study conducted in this paper was used to optimize the performance of a prototype of a plasmonic photovoltaic cell made at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems IMM of Catania, Italy. This prototype was based on a multilayer structure composed of the following layers: glass, AZO, metal and dielectric. In order to obtain good results, it is necessary to use geometries that orthogonalize the absorption of light, allowing better transport of the photocarriers-and therefore greater efficiency-or the use of less pure materials. For this reason, this study is focused on optimizing the geometries of these multilayer plasmonic structures. More specifically, in this paper, by means of a neurocomputing procedure and an electromagnetic fields analysis performed by the finite elements method (FEM), we established the relationship between the thicknesses of Aluminum-doped Zinc oxide (AZO), metal, dielectric and their main properties, characterizing the plasmonic propagation phenomena as the optimal wavelengths values at the main interfaces AZO/METAL and METAL/DIELECTRIC.
为了获得优化的基础器件（光伏模块、用于提高能源效率的功率晶体管、高效传感器），有必要提高这些器件的能量转换效率。实现这一目标的一种非常有效的方法是增加对入射辐射的吸收。增加这种吸收的一种有前景的策略是使用非常薄的活性材料区域，并在这些表面附近捕获光子。实现这种光学捕获的最有效且最具成本效益的方法是来自处于等离子体共振的激发纳米粒子的拉曼散射。等离子体激元学领域是研究利用适当的金属纳米粒子层，通过纳米粒子产生的近场效应来增加半导体中的辐射强度。在本文中，我们专注于将金属纳米粒子用作具有极高灵敏度甚至达到单分子检测的等离子体纳米传感器。本文所进行的研究用于优化由意大利卡塔尼亚微电子与微系统研究所（IMM）制造的等离子体光伏电池原型的性能。该原型基于由以下层组成的多层结构：玻璃、AZO、金属和电介质。为了获得良好的结果，有必要使用使光吸收正交化的几何结构，从而实现更好的光生载流子传输——进而提高效率——或者使用纯度较低的材料。因此，本研究专注于优化这些多层等离子体结构的几何结构。更具体地说，在本文中，通过神经计算程序和有限元方法（FEM）进行的电磁场分析，我们建立了掺铝氧化锌（AZO）、金属、电介质的厚度与其主要特性之间的关系，将等离子体传播现象表征为在AZO/金属和金属/电介质主要界面处的最佳波长值。
