This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 637367).

Titel:

Hybrid Nodes for Highly Efficient Light Concentrators

Description:

The meaning of solar energy for future decentralized power supply will largely depend on both efficiency and cost of solar to electrical power conversion. All kinds of conversion strategies including photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, solar to fuel and others would benefit from efficiently collecting solar power on large areas. For this reason luminescent solar concentrators have been developed for over thirty years, but due to waveguide losses their maximum size is still limited to a few centimetres.

The key idea in this field of research is to exploit the node of a dielectric TE1 mode in order to decrease waveguide losses. A node is a position in the waveguide where no intensity is found. A thin film placed in this node remains largely “invisible” for the propagating mode.

Based on this idea, the project was carried out from 2015 to 2020. Within this project it was demonstrated that node modes allow reduced waveguide losses, thus enabling the collection of light inside waveguide grating couplers with drastically reduced thickness compared to conventional waveguide designs.

The reduced waveguide losses have inspired new solar concentrator concepts such as waveguide stacking, the combination of mirror structures with reduced propagation losses (Zero-Order collection) in low-guidance waveguides, the light-induced self-adaption of silver nanoparticles, and time-variant systems which promise to break the radiance limit in passive devices.

Beyond these newly arisen and still ongoing fields of research, the project has led to numerous scientific publications, patents, and the development of measurement techniques and technological advances for large-scale multilayer polymer waveguides compatible to roll-to-roll processing.

Publications:

M. Buchmüller, I. Shutsko, S. O. Schumacher, and P. Görrn:
Harnessing Short-Range Surface Plasmons in Planar Silver Films via Disorder-Engineered Metasurfaces
Preprint on ArXiv:  arXiv:2305.09983 [physics.optics] (2023).

I. Shutsko, M. Buchmüller, M. Meudt, and P. Görrn:
Light-Controlled Fabrication of Disordered Hyperuniform Metasurfaces
Adv. Mater. Technol. (2022).
DOI: 10.1002/admt.202200086

I. Shutsko, M. Buchmüller, M. Meudt, and P. Görrn:
Plasmon‐Induced Disorder Engineering for Robust Optical Sensors
Adv. Optical Mat. 10, 2102783 (2022).
DOI: 10.1002/adom.202102783

M. Meudt, A. Henkel, M. Buchmüller, and P. Görrn:
A Theoretical Description of Node-Aligned Resonant Waveguide Gratings
Optics 3 (1), 60-69 (2022).
DOI: 10.3390/opt3010008

A. Henkel, M. Meudt, M. Buchmüller, and P. Görrn:
Electrically Switchable Broadband Photonic Bound States in the Continuum
Preprint on ArXiv: arXiv:2102.01686 [physics.optics] (2021).

M. Meudt, C. Bogiadzi, K. Wrobel and P. Görrn
Hybrid Photonic-Plasmonic Bound States in Continuum for Enhanced Light Manipulation
Adv. Optical Mat. 2000898 (2020). DOI: 10.1002/adom.202000898.

N. Pourdavoud, T. Haeger, A. Mayer, P. J. Cegielski, A. L. Giesecke, R. Heiderhoff, S. Olthof, S. Zaefferer, I. Shutsko, A. Henkel, D. Becker-Koch, M. Stein, M. Cehovski, O. Charfi, H.-H. Johannes, D. Rogalla, M. Lemme, M. Koch, Y. Vaynzof, K. Meerholz, W. Kowalsky, H.-C. Scheer, P. Görrn, and T. Riedl:
Room Temperature Stimulated Emission and Lasing in Recrystallized Cesium Lead Bromide Perovskite Thin Films
Adv. Mater. 31, 1903717 (2019). DOI: 10.1002/adma.201903717.

I. Shutsko, C. Böttge, J. von Bargen, A. Henkel, M. Meudt, and P. Görrn:
Enhanced hybrid optics by growing silver nanoparticles at local intensity hot spots
Nanophotonics, 8(9), pp. 1457-1464 (2019). DOI: 10.1515/nanoph-2019-0019.

M. Meudt, T. Jakob, A. Polywka, L. Stegers, S. Kropp, S. Runke, M. Zang, M. Clemens, P. Görrn:
Plasmonic Black Metasurface by Transfer Printing
Adv. Mater. Technol. (2018). DOI: 10.1002/admt.201800124

L. Hoffmann, K. O. Brinkmann, J. Malerczyk, D. Rogalla, T. Becker, D. Theirich, I. Shutsko, P. Görrn, and T. Riedl:
Spatial Atmospheric Pressure Atomic Layer Deposition of Tin Oxide as Impermeable Electron Extraction Layer for Perovskite Solar Cells with Enhanced Thermal Stability
ACS Applied Mater. & Interfaces 10, 6006 (2018). DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b17701.

N. Pourdavoud, A. Mayer, M. Buchmüller, K. Brinkmann, T. Häger, T. Hu, R. Heiderhoff, I. Shutsko, P. Görrn, Y. Chen, H.-C. Scheer, and T. Riedl:
Distributed Feedback Lasers Based on MAPbBr3
Adv. Mater. Technol. 3, 1700253 (2018). DOI: 10.1002/admt.201700253.

A. Polywka, C. Tückmantel, and P. Görrn:
Light controlled assembly of silver nanoparticles
Sci. Rep. 7, 45144 (2017). DOI: 10.1038/srep45144.

Related Patents:

P. Görrn
Method of concentrating light and light concentrator
US Patent No.: US 10,558,027 B2 (2020).

P. Görrn
Waveguide, method of projecting light from a waveguide, and display
US Patent No.: US 10,739,623 B2 (2020).