Black Diamond Films

Black diamond films developed by ISM researchers represent an appealing new material obtained by the use of ultrashort laser pulses. They show outstanding capabilities of absorbing sunlight (up to 98%) at the same time maintaining all the peculiar charge transport properties for which CVD diamond is well-known. The very high solar absorptance is induced by a subwavelength surface texturing which in turn induces a significant increase of charge photo-generation at sub-bandgap photon energies. These properties enable black diamond to be legitimately considered to fall within the groundbreaking scientific topic of inter-mediate band semiconductors, interesting for PV applications.
The use of the extreme physical properties of CVD diamond combined to an active interaction with sunlight opens a broad range of solar applications requiring also operational capability at high temperature and resistance in harsh environments. In particular, our specific aim is to use black diamond for future high-temperature solar cells and efficient selective absorbers for solar concentrating systems. 

Staff: DiaTHEMA Lab (A. Bellucci, M. Girolami, M. Mastellone, R. Polini, V. Serpente, V. Valentini, D.M. Trucchi,  F. Pallotta)
FemtoLab (S. Orlando, A. Santagata)