Pyrolytic carbon coated black silicon

Abstract

Carbon is the most well-known black material in the history of man. Throughout the centuries, carbon has been used as a black material for paintings, camouflage, and optics. Although, the techniques to make other black surfaces have evolved and become more sophisticated with time, carbon still remains one of the best black materials. Another well-known black surface is black silicon, reflecting less than 0.5% of incident light in visible spectral range but becomes a highly reflecting surface in wavelengths above 1000 nm. On the other hand, carbon absorbs at those and longer wavelengths. Thus, it is possible to combine black silicon with carbon to create an artificial material with very low reflectivity over a wide spectral range. Here we report our results on coating conformally black silicon substrate with amorphous pyrolytic carbon. We present a superior black surface with reflectance of light less than 0.5% in the spectral range of 350 nm to 2000 nm. ; The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 604391 Graphene Flagship, NP-Nano FiDiPro-project by the Finnish Funding agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES), Academy of Finland project no. 287886. AS and HL acknowledge the support from Aalto Energy Efficiency project Moppi. Support from the US National Science Foundation is also acknowledged through the CIAN ERC. ; This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.