Photonic crystal microcrystalline silicon solar cells

Abstract

Enhancing the absorption of thin-film microcrystalline silicon solar cells over a broadband range in order to improve the energy conversion efficiency is a very important challenge in the development of low cost and stable solar energy harvesting. Here, we demonstrate that a broadband enhancement of the absorption can be achieved by creating a large number of resonant modes associated with two-dimensional photonic crystal band edges. We utilize higher-order optical modes perpendicular to the silicon layer, as well as the band-folding effect by employing photonic crystal superlattice structures. We establish a method to incorporate photonic crystal structures into thin-film (~500 nm) microcrystalline silicon photovoltaic layers while suppressing undesired defects formed in the microcrystalline silicon. The fabricated solar cells exhibit 1.3 times increase of a short circuit current density (from 15.0 mA/cm2 to 19.6 mA/cm2) by introducing the photonic crystal structure, and consequently the conversion efficiency increases from 5.6% to 6.8%. Moreover, we theoretically analyze the absorption characteristics in the fabricated cell structure, and reveal that the energy conversion efficiency can be increased beyond 9.5% in a structure less than 1/400 as thick as conventional crystalline silicon solar cells with an efficiency of 24%.