Individual speckle diffraction based 1D and 2D Random Grating Fabrication for detector and solar energy harvesting applications

Laser speckles and speckle patterns, which are formed by the random interference of scattered waves from optically rough surfaces, have found tremendous applications in a wide range of metrological and biomedical fields. Here, we demonstrate a novel edge diffraction phenomenon of individual speckle for the fabrication of 1D and 2D micron and sub-micron size random gratings. These random gratings exhibit broadband response with interesting diffusive diffraction patterns. As an immediate application for solar energy harvesting, significant reduction in transmission and enhanced absorption in thin “Si-random grating-Si” sandwich structure is demonstrated. This work has multifaceted significance where we exploited the individual speckle diffraction properties for the first time. Besides the solar harvesting applications, random gratings are suitable structures for fabrication of theoretically proposed random quantum well IR detectors and hence expected that this work will augur well for such studies in the near future.