Abstract
We report an approach for substantially enhancing the light-trapping and photoconversion efficiency of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) single-nanowire solar cells (SNSCs) by engineering the cross section of the nanowire from circular into a front-opening crescent shape. The proposed SNSCs show a broadband and highly tunable optical absorption compared to the conventional circular counterparts under both transverse electric and transverse magnetic incidences, enabling an enhancement ratio of over 40 % in both the photocurrent density and the photoconversion efficiency in a-Si:H SNSCs with a diameter of 200 nm. We further show that the superior performance can be well maintained under a wide range of incident angle and is robust to the blunt crescent edges.
Highlights
Single semiconductor nanowires (NWs) have been explored extensively over the past decades due to their unique nanoscale morphology and outstanding photoelectric response, which can find a variety of potential applications, e.g., photovoltaics (PV) [1,2,3,4], photodetectors/ sensors [5,6,7], light-emitting diodes [8,9,10], and thermoelectric devices [11,12,13]
For the amorphous silicon (a-Si):H singlenanowire solar cells (SNSCs) which consisted of a much smaller cavity, the supported cavity modes are much less in number, so that the rear-opening crescent design can hardly play a similar effect in enhancing the absorption performance as that in the crystalline silicon (c-Si) SNSCs
In summary, we proposed a design of a-Si:H-based SNSCs with front-crescent cross-sectional morphology in order to obtain broadband and strong optical absorption for efficient photoconversion
Summary
Single semiconductor nanowires (NWs) have been explored extensively over the past decades due to their unique nanoscale morphology and outstanding photoelectric response, which can find a variety of potential applications, e.g., photovoltaics (PV) [1,2,3,4], photodetectors/ sensors [5,6,7], light-emitting diodes [8,9,10], and thermoelectric devices [11,12,13]. Among various performance-modulation strategies, optimizing the cross-sectional morphology of NWs is an easy way to enhance the light-harvesting response [23,24,25,26]. We recently found that the light-trapping ability of silicon-based SNSCs can be significantly
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