Enhanced light trapping in periodically truncated cone silicon nanowire structure**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51072194, 61021003, 61036001, 61376057).

Abstract

Light trapping plays an important role in improving the conversion efficiency of thin-film solar cells. The good wideband light trapping is achieved using our periodically truncated cone Si nanowire (NW) structures, and their inherent mechanism is analyzed and simulated by FDTD solution software. Ordered cylinder Si NW structure with initial size of 80 nm and length of 200 nm is grown by pattern transfer and selective epitaxial growth. Truncated cone Si NW array is then obtained by thermal oxidation treatment. Its mean reflection in the range of 300–900 nm is lowered to be 5% using 140 nm long truncated cone Si NW structure, compared with that of 20% using cylinder counterparts. It indicates that periodically truncated Si cone structures trap the light efficiently to enhance the light harvesting in a wide spectral range and have the potential application in highly efficient NW solar cells.