Nanowerk  July 26, 2023 The photosensitivity of silicon is inherently very low in the visible electromagnetic spectrum, and it drops rapidly beyond 800 nm in near-infrared wavelengths. Utilizing photon-trapping surface structures a team of researchers in the US (UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, industry) demonstrated photoabsorption improvement in 1-μm-thin silicon, surpassing the inherent absorption efficiency of gallium arsenide for a broad spectrum. The photon-trapping structures allowed the bending of normally incident light by almost 90 deg to transform into laterally propagating modes along the silicon plane. The propagation length of light increased, contributing to more than one order of magnitude […]