Accurate, Stable and Efficient Modal Calculations of Photoelectrically Useful Absorption in Lamellar Metallic and Semiconductor Diffraction Gratings

Solar energy has seen tremendous advances in the past years. For thin film photovoltaics, which use less of the expensive semiconductor materials, insufficient light absorption can be a limiting factor. It is hoped that by using diffractive optics to improve the light absorption, the cost per Watt could sink. Correspondingly, the optics of such structures need to compensate for the low absorption by high (structural) resonance, which is challenging to calculate. To estimate optimal structures, a numerical method should be able to assess feasible structures with widely varying geometries quickly. Modal methods allow for an efficient analysis of structures with varying height through the separation of eigenvalue and boundary value problem. First, the thesis aspires to further develop the modal methods for the calculation of optical properties of layered structures containing weakly absorbing metals and semiconductors. Second, the thesis aims to calculate absorption enhancements in idealized, prototypical structures by applying the newly developed methods. The calculations should only depend on material parameters and not contain additional assumptions. These absorption enhancements are not tied to a priori assumptions such as mode couplings, but they solely follow the physics of the structure investigated. The first part of the thesis is concerned with the methodical improvements. A first emphasis is put on studying peculiar properties of the eigenvalue problem, and on new developments of methods to solve it within a layer. Furthermore, it shows several variants for the numerical implementation of the eigenvalue problem. This part includes a new method to calculate the eigenvalues that can be adapted to two dimensional grating problems of arbitrary shape. The new method integrates the eigenvalue problem by making use of a two point trapezoidal formula, and satisfies the boundary condition between different materials exactly. It is energy conserving and the rate of convergence depends on the approximation order. The eigenvalues show a monotonic convergence that allows for extrapolation. The second methodical emphasis is placed on variants of the implementation of the boundary value problem that connects the grating to the incoming and outgoing plane waves. This algorithm describes the propagation of the incident energy to the semiconductor layer and the substrate by solving a non-recursive and numerically stable system of linear equations. A novel variant reduces the bandwidth of the corresponding matrix by a third. The third part of the thesis concerns calculations using the improved methods. First, the improved calculations are verified by showing that the energy conservation of the modal method, as well as the well-behavedness of the condition number of the calculation. Next, numerical results for the new methods are compared to results from the literature for analytic modal methods, and a comparison with existing software is made. Thereafter, the interface plasmons occuring for H polarization are investigated. In the last part of the thesis, calculations are made for the material specific absorption of light in metallic gratings covered by semiconductors, with a special interest in the absorption in the semiconductor. Here, the spectra for rectangular, sinusoidal gratings, and asymmetric gratings are calculated, and the absorption improvement is investigated through an analysis of the involved modes.