Periodic antireflection surface structure fabricated on silicon by four-beam laser interference lithography

Silicon surface structures with excellent antireflection property arouse wide interest. Chemical and physical methods such as femtosecond, nanosecond, and picosecond laser processing, wet-chemical etching, electrochemical etching, and reactive ion etching have been developed to fabricate them. However, the methods can only produce a quasi-ordered array of sharp conical microspikes on silicon surface. In this paper, we present a method to fabricate periodic silicon antireflection surface structures using direct four-beam laser interference lithography (LIL). With 1 atm ambient atmosphere of SF6 and the laser fluence of the four beams irradiated on the silicon surface at 0.64 J cm-2, the periodical conical spikes were generated. Changing the polarization directions of the opposite incident beam pairs in a four-beam LIL system could convert conical spikes structure into an array of holes. Antireflection in a wide spectral range was measured by a spectrophotometer from ultraviolet to near-infrared. The average reflectance of this periodic black silicon surface is less than 3.5%. © 2014 Laser Institute of America.