Antireflective structures on silicon surface using catalytic nickel nanoparticles

In this work, we present a nickel assisted electroless deposition and etching method for significant reduction of reflectivity of silicon by creating two-scale structured silicon surface. As the first step, the nano-texturization process was applied on planar Si wafers in order to optimize the process. Next, we applied this method for silicon surface with chemically prepared pyramids in order to produce a hierarchical (micron/nano) structure. We found that silicon wafers with hierarchical structure shown very low about 2.2% weighted reflection over broad wavelength range from 300 to 1100 nm, which is related with changes in surface morphology.