Design of antireflective nanostructures and optical coatings for next-generation multijunction photovoltaic devices

The successful development of multijunction photovoltaic devices with four or more subcells has placed additional importance on the design of high-quality broadband antireflection coatings. Antireflective nanostructures have shown promise for reducing reflection loss compared to the best thin-film interference coatings. However, material constraints make nanostructures difficult to integrate without introducing additional absorption or electrical losses. In this work, we compare the performance of various nanostructure configurations with that of an optimized multilayer antireflection coating. Transmission into a four-junction solar cell is computed for each antireflective design, and the corresponding cell efficiency is calculated. We find that the best performance is achieved with a hybrid configuration that combines nanostructures with a multilayer thin-film optical coating. This approach increases transmitted power into the top subcell by 1.3% over an optimal thin-film coating, corresponding to an increase of approximately 0.8% in the modeled cell efficiency. (C)2014 Optical Society of America