Dopant‐free back contact silicon heterojunction solar cells employing transition metal oxide emitters

Abstract

The present study investigates the electrical properties of transition metal oxide (TMO) emitters in dopant‐free n‐Si back contact solar cells by comparing the properties of solar cells employing three TMOs (WOx, MoOx and V2Ox) with varying electrical properties acting as p‐type contacts. The TMOs are found to induce large band bending in n‐Si, which reduces the injection level dependent interfacial recombination speed Seff and contact resistivity ρc. Among the TMO/n‐Si contacts considered, the V2Ox/n‐Si contact achieves the lowest Seff of 138 cm/s and ρc of 0.034 Ω cm2, providing the significant advantages over heavily doped a‐Si:H(p)/n‐Si contacts. The best device performance was achieved by the V2Ox/n‐Si solar cell, demonstrating an efficiency of 16.59% and an open‐circuit voltage of 610 mV relative to solar cells based on MoOx/n‐Si (15.09%, 594 mV) and WOx/n‐Si (12.44%, 539 mV). Furthermore, the present work is the first to employ WOx, V2Ox and Cs2CO3 in back contact solar cells. The fabrication process employed offers great potential for the mass production of back contact solar cells owing to simple, metal mask patterning with high alignment quality and dopant‐free steps conducted at a lower temperature.