Journal article
Plasmonic versus dielectric enhancement in thin-film solar cells
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark1
Department of Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark2
Structured Electromagnetic Materials, Department of Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark3
Solid Mechanics, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark4
Several studies have indicated that broadband absorption of thin-film solar cells can be enhanced by use of surface-plasmon induced resonances of metallic parts like strips or particles. The metallic parts may create localized modes or scatter incoming light to increase absorption in thin-film semiconducting material.
For a particular case, we show that coupling to the same type of localized slab-waveguide modes can be obtained by a surface modulation consisting of purely dielectric strips. The purely dielectric device turns out to have a significantly higher broadband enhancement factor compared to its metallic counterpart.
We show that the enhanced normalized short-circuit current for a cell with silicon strips can be increased 4 times compared to the best performance for strips of silver, gold, or aluminium. For this particular case, the simple dielectric grating may outperform its plasmonic counterpart due to the larger Ohmic losses associated with the latter.
Language: | English |
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Publisher: | American Institute of Physics |
Year: | 2012 |
Pages: | 211914 |
ISSN: | 10773118 and 00036951 |
Types: | Journal article |
DOI: | 10.1063/1.4719203 |
ORCIDs: | Mortensen, N. Asger and Sigmund, Ole |