High-efficiency photonic crystal solar cell architecture

Thin silicon solar cells suffer from low light absorption compared to their thick counterparts, especially in the near infra-red regime. In order to obtain high energy conversion efficiency in thin solar cells, an efficient light trapping scheme is required. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate significant enhancement in efficiency of thin crystalline silicon solar cells by using photonic crystals as the light absorbing layer.

In particular, a relative increase of 11.15% and 3.87% in the energy conversion efficiency compared to the optimized conventional design is achieved for 2 microm and 10 microm thicknesses, respectively.