Influence of light absorption on the metallic nanotextured reflectors of GaN-based light emitting diodes

Metallic nanotextured reflectors have been widely used in light emitting diodes (LEDs) to enhance the light extraction efficiency. However, the light absorption loss for the metallic reflectors with nanotexture structure is often neglected. Here, the influence of absorption loss of metallic nanotextured reflectors on the LED optoelectronic properties were studied. Two commonly used metal reflectors Ag and Al were applied to green GaN-based LEDs. By applying a Ag nanotextured reflector, the light output power of the LEDs was enhanced by 78% due to the improved light extraction. For an Al nanotextured reflector, however, only a 6% enhancement of the light output power was achieved. By analyzing the metal absorption using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) and the metal reflectivity spectrum, it is shown that the surface plasmon (SP) intrinsic absorption of metallic reflectors with nanotexture structure play an important role. This finding will aid the design of the high-performance metal nanotextured reflectors and optoelectronics devices. (paper)