ABSTRACT
Anti-reflection coatings (ARC's) are a key and vital feature for high-efficiency silicon solar cell design. They are also widely used to increase transmission and reduce glare resulting from window coatings in a diverse range of industries such as photovoltaics, buildings, displays, and opthalmics. ARC's currently in use enhance the transparency of certain surfaces by the introduction of a smooth and gradual change in effective refractive index between two media, which results in improved efficiency of some commercial architectural glazing and solar collectors. In this chapter, the real-world application of inverse problems is concerned the determination of a space-dependent index of refraction of an optical anti-reflection coating structure. The mathematical model is based on solving an inverse coefficient identification problem for the one-dimensional Helmholtz equation. The additional data necessary for the inversion can be the full complex reflection coefficient or its absolute value only, measured for many wavenumbers.
