Femtosecond laser fabrication of large-area periodic surface ripple structure on Si substrate

In this paper, we report the fabrication of a large area uniformly distributed periodic nano-ripple structure on silicon substrate through the proper scanning of a line-shaped femtosecond laser beam. The fabricated nano-ripple structure has a periodicity of ∼600 nm and a ripple depth of ∼300 nm. The modulation depth is much deeper than the one previously reported. The developed structure is demonstrated to be able to substantially reduce light reflection due to the effective optical coupling between the incident sunlight with the nano-ripple structure and exhibit an absorption enhancement of ∼41% compared with planar silicon wafer. The physics underlying the formation of the nano-ripple structure is also discussed.