Figure 2 XRD patterns of films deposited on substrates coated by PS nanospheres with

diameter of 200 nm. The absorptance (A) spectra shown in Figure 3 was calculated by Equation 1. (1) Figure 3 Absorptance spectra of films deposited on substrates coated by PS nanospheres with different diameters. The film deposited on plain glass showed poor absorptance of lower than 10%, especially within a wavelength above 800 nm. In comparison, the absorptance of films deposited on patterned substrates enhances appreciably to more than 80%. As the diameter of the nanopillar increases, the absorptance of the corresponding film rises within the whole wavelength range. The positive correlation between absorptance and diameter can be attributed to the increasing porosity of the nanostructure, which extensively lengthens P505-15 concentration the path of incident light and enhances the absorptance [8]. In order to evaluate the optical bandgap of the thin film, the Tauc formula was utilized [15]. (2) (3) In Equation 2, α is the calculated absorption coefficient of the film which can be derived from Equation 3, d is the thickness of film and it was set as 700 nm here, hv is the energy of NVP-BSK805 photon, A is a constant, n

is 1/2 for indirect band material in this case, and E g is the optical bandgap. We extrapolate the linear part of the (αhν)1/2 - hν plot to the X-axis, and the intercept is regarded as the calculated optical bandgap. The schematic diagram and results are shown in Figure 4 and Table 2, respectively. Figure 4 Schematic diagram of Tauc plot. Tauc plot was used to measure the optical bandgap of the film deposited for 90 min on a substrate coated by 1,000-nm PS nanospheres. Table 2 The optical bandgap of thin films as deposited   Diameter (nm) 0 200 500 1,000 E g (eV) 2.10 1.83 1.77 1.50 The reduction of optical bandgap is in accordance with the increase of absorptance. A material can only absorb photons

MYO10 with energy higher than its bandgap, so optical bandgap holds the essence of light absorption and the absorptance depends straightly on optical bandgap. The manipulation of optical bandgap would have direct influence on absorptance. To investigate the influence of ion irradiation on the optical bandgap of amorphous silicon thin film, films deposited on the 200-nm PS nanosphere layer were irradiated by 200-keV Xe ion with doses of 1 × 1014, 5 × 1014, 10 × 1014, and 50 × 1014 ions/cm2. The cross-sectional views of irradiated film are shown in Figure 5. Figure 5 The cross-sectional views of irradiated films with different doses. (a) 1 × 1014 ions/cm2, (b) 5 × 1014 ions/cm2, (c) 10 × 1014 ions/cm2, and (d) 50 × 1014 ions/cm2. In the view of the original film shown in Figure 1b, silicon nanopillars are separated from each other. After ion irradiation, the top part of silicon nanopillars melted and recrystallized during the process.