Abstract
Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells have some performance limitations related to the mobility and lifetime of their carriers. For this reason, it is interesting to explore thin-film solutions, achieving a tradeoff between photons optical absorption and the electrical path of the carriers to get the optimum thickness. In this work, we propose the insertion of a metasurface based on a cross-patterned ITO contact film, where the crosses are filled with nanospheres. We numerically demonstrate that this configuration improves the photogenerated current up to a 40% by means of the resonant effects produced by the metasurface, being independent on the impinging light polarization. Light handling mechanisms guide light into the active and auxiliary layers, increasing the effective absorption and mitigating the Staebler-Wronski effect. The selection of optimum materials and parameters results in nanospheres of ZnO with a 220 nm radius.
Highlights
Metasurfaces based on nano-elements that can tune their optical response by changing their materials and geometries have been a matter of interest in the last years, for increasing both the emission and absorption of light at certain wavelengths (Vaskin et al, 2019; Zou et al, 2019)
We numerically demonstrate that this configuration improves the photogenerated current up to a 40% by means of the resonant effects produced by the metasurface, being independent on the impinging light polarization
We explore a combination of two approaches to enhance the performance of a hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cell: a pattern based on cross-shaped grooves, and their filling with dielectric nanospheres
Summary
Metasurfaces based on nano-elements that can tune their optical response by changing their materials and geometries have been a matter of interest in the last years, for increasing both the emission and absorption of light at certain wavelengths (Vaskin et al, 2019; Zou et al, 2019). While traditionally focused on metallic nanoplasmonics using different shapes and geometries (Atwater and Polman, 2010; Khan et al, 2019), the study has recently been oriented to dielectric nanostructures supporting Mie resonances (Spinelli et al, 2012). The reasons are their low absorption losses and their easy integration in diverse solar cells and semiconductor-based emitters (Brongersma et al, 2014; Vismara et al, 2019; Therekov et al, 2019; Barreda et al, 2019b; Algorri et al, 2019; Elshorbagy et al, 2019). The authors claimed that their proposal absorbs 3.15 times more light than a planar structure after optimizing the materials to have a remarkably low-losses and forward scattering condition
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