Effect of number of stack on the thermal escape and non-radiative and radiative recombinations of photoexcited carriers in strain-balanced InGaAs/GaAsP multiple quantum-well-inserted solar cells

Abstract

Three non-destructive methodologies, namely, surface photovoltage (SPV), photoluminescence, and piezoelectric photothermal (PPT) spectroscopies, were adopted to detect the thermal carrier escape from quantum well (QW) and radiative and non-radiative carrier recombinations, respectively, in strain-balanced InGaAs/GaAsP multiple-quantum-well (MQW)-inserted GaAs p-i-n solar cell structure samples. Although the optical absorbance signal intensity was proportional to the number of QW stack, the signal intensities of the SPV and PPT methods decreased at high number of stack. To explain the temperature dependency of these signal intensities, we proposed a model that considers the three carrier dynamics: the thermal escape from the QW, and the non-radiative and radiative carrier recombinations within the QW. From the fitting procedures, it was estimated that the activation energies of the thermal escape ΔEbarr and non-radiative recombination ΔENR were 68 and 29 meV, respectively, for a 30-stacked MQW sample. The estimated ΔEbarr value agreed well with the difference between the first electron subband and the top of the potential barrier in the conduction band. We found that ΔEbarr remained constant at approximately 70 meV even with increasing QW stack number. However, the ΔENR value monotonically increased with the increase in the number of stack. Since this implies that non-radiative recombination becomes improbable as the number of stack increases, we found that the radiative recombination probability for electrons photoexcited within the QW increased at a large number of QW stack. Additional processes of escaping and recapturing of carriers at neighboring QW were discussed. As a result, the combination of the three non-destructive methodologies provided us new insights for optimizing the MQW components to further improve the cell performance.