Enhancing the efficiency and short-circuit current of silicon solar cells using MoO3 as emitter layers

Abstract

Molybdenum trioxide (MoO3) is an interesting material for optoelectronic applications due to their low-cost, simple processing and thickness-dependent band gap tunability. So far, however, few have been reported to date the impact of post-synthesis annealing on the electrical characteristics of the MoO3 in silicon heterojunctions solar cells. Here, we show that Ar annealing treatment can promote the crystallization of MoO3 nano structures (NSs) and enlarge the MoO3 NSs crystalline size. In this work, thermal evaporation technique is used to prepare MoO3 NSs to be used as emitter layers in silicon heterojunctions solar cell. Then, the as-synthesized sample is annealed under Ar gas flow at 600 °C to improve structural and optical properties of the sample. It is noted that by Ar treatment at 600 °C, we found its quantum efficiency (QE) enhances from 8.41 % to 10.74 %, showing a 27.70 % increase due to a significant enhancement of short circuit-current (ISC). Furthermore, EQE of Ag/Ar treatment MoO3/n-type Si/Ag showed significant enhancement entire spectra range especially in visible region respect to the bare cell.