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      Self-assembly of highly efficient, broadband plasmonic absorbers for solar steam generation

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          Abstract

          A self-assembling plasmonic absorber absorbs light efficiently across a wide range of wavelengths and could be used in nanophotonic devices.

          Abstract

          The study of ideal absorbers, which can efficiently absorb light over a broad range of wavelengths, is of fundamental importance, as well as critical for many applications from solar steam generation and thermophotovoltaics to light/thermal detectors. As a result of recent advances in plasmonics, plasmonic absorbers have attracted a lot of attention. However, the performance and scalability of these absorbers, predominantly fabricated by the top-down approach, need to be further improved to enable widespread applications. We report a plasmonic absorber which can enable an average measured absorbance of ~99% across the wavelengths from 400 nm to 10 μm, the most efficient and broadband plasmonic absorber reported to date. The absorber is fabricated through self-assembly of metallic nanoparticles onto a nanoporous template by a one-step deposition process. Because of its efficient light absorption, strong field enhancement, and porous structures, which together enable not only efficient solar absorption but also significant local heating and continuous stream flow, plasmonic absorber–based solar steam generation has over 90% efficiency under solar irradiation of only 4-sun intensity (4 kW m −2). The pronounced light absorption effect coupled with the high-throughput self-assembly process could lead toward large-scale manufacturing of other nanophotonic structures and devices.

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          Most cited references36

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          Composite Medium with Simultaneously Negative Permeability and Permittivity

          We demonstrate a composite medium, based on a periodic array of interspaced conducting nonmagnetic split ring resonators and continuous wires, that exhibits a frequency region in the microwave regime with simultaneously negative values of effective permeability &mgr;(eff)(omega) and permittivity varepsilon(eff)(omega). This structure forms a "left-handed" medium, for which it has been predicted that such phenomena as the Doppler effect, Cherenkov radiation, and even Snell's law are inverted. It is now possible through microwave experiments to test for these effects using this new metamaterial.
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            A Perfect Metamaterial Absorber

            We present the design for an absorbing metamaterial element with near unity absorbance. Our structure consists of two metamaterial resonators that couple separately to electric and magnetic fields so as to absorb all incident radiation within a single unit cell layer. We fabricate, characterize, and analyze a metamaterial absorber with a slightly lower predicted absorbance of 96%. This achieves a simulated full width at half maximum (FWHM) absorbance of 4% thus making this material ideal for imaging purposes. Unlike conventional absorbers, our metamaterial consists solely of metallic elements. The underlying substrate can therefore be chosen independently of the substrate's absorptive qualities and optimized for other parameters of interest. We detail the design and simulation process that led to our metamaterial, and our experiments demonstrate a peak absorbance greater than 88% at 11.5 GHz.
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              Directed self-assembly of nanoparticles.

              Within the field of nanotechnology, nanoparticles are one of the most prominent and promising candidates for technological applications. Self-assembly of nanoparticles has been identified as an important process where the building blocks spontaneously organize into ordered structures by thermodynamic and other constraints. However, in order to successfully exploit nanoparticle self-assembly in technological applications and to ensure efficient scale-up, a high level of direction and control is required. The present review critically investigates to what extent self-assembly can be directed, enhanced, or controlled by either changing the energy or entropy landscapes, using templates or applying external fields.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Adv
                Sci Adv
                SciAdv
                advances
                Science Advances
                American Association for the Advancement of Science
                2375-2548
                April 2016
                08 April 2016
                : 2
                : 4
                : e1501227
                Affiliations
                [1 ]National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China.
                [2 ]Department of Electrical Engineering, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
                [3 ]School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China.
                [4 ]Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
                Author notes
                [*]

                These authors contributed equally to this work.

                []Corresponding author. E-mail: jiazhu@ 123456nju.edu.cn
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8405-5310
                Article
                1501227
                10.1126/sciadv.1501227
                4846456
                27152335
                91b46e55-9b99-493d-9b0d-5a994d9f98a7
                Copyright © 2016, The Authors

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 03 September 2015
                : 10 January 2016
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001809, National Natural Science Foundation of China (CN);
                Award ID: ID0EARBI4464
                Award ID: 11321063
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: State Key Program for Basic Research of China;
                Award ID: ID0E6YBI4465
                Award ID: 2015CB659300
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Research Article
                Research Articles
                SciAdv r-articles
                Applied Optics
                Custom metadata
                Mikaella Bernabe

                plasmonics,self-assembly,solar steam,absorber
                plasmonics, self-assembly, solar steam, absorber

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