In recent years, research efforts have been dedicated to improve light coupling into solar cells and reduce optical losses. However, the more widely used methods like direct-nanostructuring of the absorber layer or anti-reflective (AR) coatings are either insufficient and/or infeasible for light-trapping in thin solar cells on the industrial roadmap, or they degrade the electronic properties of the resulting solar cell.
To overcome the limitations of such traditional approaches, one can use disordered photonic nanostructures consisting of metasurfaces made from high-index nanodisks that can be fabricated with techniques based on self-assembly on macroscopically large wafers. Specifically, their disordered arrangement can be tailored, and we particularly worked towards a correlated, nearly-hyperuniform disorder. The benefit of that arrangement is preserving an effective rotational symmetry in the structure along with a short-ranged geometric order. Furthermore, when combining these characteristics with the optical properties of the isolated scatterers, which are forming the meta-surface and are characterized by the simultaneous excitation of electric and magnetic dipole moments, the helicity of light in the interaction process is preserved. In this way, the reflection is also suppressed and most of the light is scattered in forward direction into an angular cone with an opening angle that can be adjusted by deterministically controlling sample details. This renders our disordered photonic nanostructures superior to conventional methods. At the conference, we aim to present the state-of-the-art of our research from a holistic perspective, covering experimental and theoretical and numerical aspects.