Light propagation through textured surfaces

Abstract

Although surface texturing is applied in various kinds of devices like solar cells and light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the scattering phenomena occurring at textured surfaces have not been studied in detail yet. We present a novel technique which allows the measurement of the angular distribution of light scattered at textured surfaces into a piece of semiconductor. It relies on an integrated detector, because the scattered light cannot, in general, be detected externally. We give a detailed description of the main features of this method, focusing on the reliability of the results. Using this technique, we investigate the scattering at a surface textured by natural lithography for the application in LEDs.