  Black body materials prove promising candidates to meet future energy demands
as they are able to harvest energy from the total bandwidth of solar radiation.
Here, we report on high absorption (> 98 %) near-black body-like structures
consisting of a silica scaffold and Ag nanoparticles with a layer thickness
below 10 um; fabricated using metastable atomic layer deposition (MS-ALD) and
to be applied for a wide solar spectrum ranging from 220 nm to 2500 nm. Several
effects contribute collectively and in a synergistic manner to the high
absorbance, including the pronounced heterogeneity of the nanoparticles in size
and shape, particle plasmon hybridization and the trapping of
omni-directionally scattered light in the 3D hierarchical hybrid structures. We
propose that, in the future, MS-ALD needs to be considered as a simple and
promising method to fabricate black-body materials with excellent broadband
absorption.
