Abstract
The photogenerated current of solar cells can be enhanced by light management with surface structures. For solar cells with optically thin absorbing layers, it is especially important to take advantage of this fact through light trapping. The general idea behind light trapping is to use structures, either on the front surface or on the back, to scatter light rays to maximize their path length in the absorber. In this paper, we investigate the potential of chaotic scattering for light trapping. It is well known that the trajectories close to the invariant set of a chaotic scatterer spend a very long time inside of the scatterer before they leave. The invariant set, also called the chaotic repeller, contains all rays of infinite length that never enter or leave the region of the scatterer. If chaotic repellers exist in a system, a chaotic dynamics is present in the scatterer. As a model system, we investigate an elliptical dome structure placed on top of an optically thin absorbing film, a system inspired by the chaotic Bunimovich stadium. A classical ray-tracing program has been developed to classify the scattering dynamics and to evaluate the absorption efficiency, modeled with Beer-Lambert's law. We find that there is a strong correlation between the enhancement of absorption efficiency and the onset of chaotic scattering in such systems. The dynamics of the systems was shown to be chaotic by their positive Lyapunov exponents and the noninteger fractal dimension of their scattering fractals.
Highlights
Photovoltaic solar cells (PV) are an increasingly important source of renewable energy
We investigate an elliptical dome structure placed on top of an optically thin absorbing lm, a system inspired by the chaotic Bunimovich stadium
We found that increasing the index of refraction inside the dome structure leads to a transition of the system from one that scatters regularly, to one with chaotic scattering dynamics
Summary
Photovoltaic solar cells (PV) are an increasingly important source of renewable energy. Silicon exhibits an indirect electronic band gap, which results in weak absorption This makes the development of surface structures with e cient light-trapping properties even more important for thin silicon solar cells. Scitation.org/journal/cha of them are already implemented in solar cell technology These e orts range from plasmonics[2] to surface-structured light-trapping designs with either ordered structures or random surfaces.[3,4,5,6,7,8,9] In lighttrapping designs, the aim is to establish surface structures that keep as many of the incoming light rays as long as possible in the absorber. We investigate if chaotic scattering can be considered as a mechanism for absorption enhancement and eventually used as a guide for designing e cient solar cell surfaces for thin solar cells. We compare our classical ray-tracing simulations with nite di erence time domain (FDTD) electromagnetic (E&M) wave calculations
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