Enhanced absorption in silicon metamaterials waveguide structure

Abstract

Metamaterial waveguide structures for silicon solar cells are a novel approach to antireflection coating structures that can be used for the achievement of high absorption in silicon solar cells. This paper investigates numerically the possibility of improving the performance of a planar waveguide silicon solar cell by incorporating a pair of silicon nitride/metamaterial layer between a semi-infinite glass cover layer and a semi-infinite silicon substrate layer. The optimized layer thicknesses of the pair are determined under the solar spectrum AM1.5 by the effective average reflectance method. The transmission and reflection coefficients are derived by the transfer matrix method for values of metamaterial’s refractive index in visible and near-infrared radiation. In addition, the absorption coefficient is examined for several angles of incidence of the transverse electric polarized (TE), transverse magnetic polarized (TM) and the total (TE&TM) guided waves. Numerical results provide an extremely high absorption. The absorptivity of the structure achieves greater than 98 %.