Heavily-doped semiconductor infrared antennas for solar energy harvesting

In this paper, a study is conducted into using semiconductor materials in designing nanoantennas for solar energy harvesting. Different thin wire dipole nanoantennas made of carbon, heavily doped Ge and heavily doped Si are designed and their performance is compared with metal nanoantenna made of gold. Method of moments (MoM) is employed to numerically solve Hallen's integral equation in order to find the nanoantenna characteristics. The results show that carbon nanotube exhibit poor performance due to its low conductivity, whereas doping the semiconductor heavily can increase the conductivity and hence improve the efficiency.