Journal
IEEE JOURNAL OF PHOTOVOLTAICS
Volume 4, Issue 1, Pages 175-182Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/JPHOTOV.2013.2280340
Keywords
Light trapping; optimization; subwavelength
Funding
- DOE Light-Material Interactions in Energy Conversion Energy Frontier Research Center [DE-SC0001293]
- National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
- Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Fellowship Program (DOE SCGF)
- American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [DE-AC05-06OR23100]
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Light trapping in solar cells allows for increased current and voltage, as well as reduced materials cost. It is known that in geometrical optics, a maximum 4n(2) absorption enhancement factor can be achieved by randomly texturing the surface of the solar cell, where n is the material refractive index. This ray-optics absorption enhancement (AE) limit only holds when the thickness of the solar cell is much greater than the optical wavelength. In subwavelength thin films, the fundamental questions remain unanswered: 1) what is the subwavelength AE limit and 2) what surface texture realizes this optimal AE? We turn to computational electromagnetic optimization in order to design nanoscale textures for light trapping in subwavelength thin films. For high-index thin films, in the weakly absorbing limit, our optimized surface textures yield an angle-and frequency-averaged enhancement factor similar to 39. They perform roughly 30% better than randomly textured structures, but they fall short of the ray optics enhancement limit of 4n(2) similar to 50.
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