Theoretical investigation of vanadium oxide film with surface microstructure

This paper presents a method to design a surface microstructure of vanadium oxide to enhance optical absorption. This method, using a density of eigenfrequency, can be calculated by a planar wave expand method, to indicate the absorption efficiency of a dispersion material, which can be used as an approach method for further design. Based on this, a nanostructure-based vanadium oxide film is designed and simulated to validate this method. The simulation results show that the tendency of density of eigenfrequency is corresponding to the tendency of optical absorption enhancement. Moreover, this structure can achieve high optical broadband absorption when the material dispersion is considered. High optical absorption enhancement can be achieved by adjusting the geometrical parameters; our maximum overall enhancement absorption ratio was 31.84% at the metal phase, which can be attributed to the enhancement effect of a photonic band edge.