Engineered disorder in photonics

Analysis and fabrication of antireflective coating for photovoltaics based on a photonic-crystal concept and generated by evolutionary optimization

“…In similar situations, engineered disorder has actually proven to be a very fruitful approach [25]. Even seemingly ordered structures which occur in nature, like that of the Morpho butterfly [10], do contain some kind of correlated disorder [25]. The structures we obtain do also, to better adapt to the AM1.5 spectrum obviously, but this remains limitedso that the ordered structure can always be distinguished.…”

“…For a photovoltaic problem, extending over most of the visible spectrum and with a relatively bumpy AM1.5 illumination, a much more disordered structure could have been expected. In similar situations, engineered disorder has actually proven to be a very fruitful approach [25]. Even seemingly ordered structures which occur in nature, like that of the Morpho butterfly [10], do contain some kind of correlated disorder [25].…”

Orientation order parameters and effective conductivity of a 2-D solid with partially disordered array of circular inhomogeneities

“…It was shown [7,8] that the characterization strongly depends on the number of Voronoi closest neighbors. Qualitative classification of uncorrelated disorder that includes order, uncorrelated disorder, and novel classes of correlated disorder has been proposed [9]. The ability to engineer disorder in materials requires, however, a capacity to classify them quantitatively.…”

“…In physical problems, however, quantitative characterization of microstructure cannot be separated from the material property of interest—microstructural parameters governing different physical properties may be different [19]. New phenomena in photonics can be observed if the particles’ arrangement is neither perfectly periodic nor perfectly random [9]. It means that in parallel with solving the homogenization problem for a certain property of interest, one should monitor certain measures of order to ensure that the system is either in a stable ordered state or in a disordered state along the metastable extension [20] because the overall properties corresponding to these configurations may differ significantly.…”

Light Confinement by Local Index Tailoring in Inhomogeneous Dielectrics

“…[1] Structures that are much easier to fabricate and that also feature strongly localized resonances are disordered media, whose potential for applications has been widely studied in recent years. [3,4,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] The multiple scattering of light, however, prevents a straightforward control of the resonances inside these media such that engineering their location and shape both in the spatial and in the spectral domain remains difficult. This is due to the fact that any local change of the refractive index of the disordered medium will have a considerable influence on the entire intensity distribution of a wave propagating through this medium (provided, of course, that the intensity is not negligible in the region where the refractive index is changed).…”