Nanostructured photon management for high performance solar cells

Advanced photon management, involving both absorption enhancement and reflection reduction, is critical to all photovoltaic devices. Here we discuss a novel solar cell structure with an efficient photon management design. The centerpiece of the design is the nanocone structure, which is fabricated by a scalable low temperature process. With this design, devices with a very thin active layer can achieve near perfect absorption because of both efficient anti-reflection and absorption enhancement over a broadband of spectra and a wide range of angles of incidence. The device performance of this design is significantly superior to that of conventional devices. More excitingly, the design and process is in principle not limited to any specific materials: hence it opens up exciting opportunities for a variety of photovoltaic devices to further improve the performance, reduce materials usage, and relieve the abundance limitation. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.