Light trapping efficiency of periodic and quasiperiodic back-reflectors for thin film solar cells: A comparative study

Abstract

Recently, great efforts have been carried out to design optimized metallic nano-grating back-reflectors to improve the light absorption in thin film solar cells. In this work, we compare the performances of deterministic aperiodic backreflectors in the form of 1-D nanogratings based on the generalized Fibonacci deterministic aperiodic sequence with a standard periodic one. The case of study here analyzed relies on a realistic solar cell model, where light absorption is evaluated only in the intrinsic region of an amorphous silicon P-I-N junction. We found that the results of comparison are strongly influenced by the amorphous silicon extinction coefficient within the near-infrared wavelength range, where most photonic-plasmonic modes (responsible for the light absorption enhancement typically observed when structured metal nanogratings are employed) are excited. In particular, with device-grade hydrogenated amorphous silicon, we demonstrate that Fibonacci-like backreflectors are able to provide an absorption enhancement of about 4% and 20% with respect to periodic and flat metallic backreflectors, respectively. We also found that aperiodic gratings guarantee better results in terms of robustness to the incident angle of the incoming radiation. Overall, our results confirm that aperiodic geometries are effectively able to offer some intriguing perspectives to enhance light trapping capability in thin film solar cells especially thanks to the large set of patterns employable to enable a proper design of resonant modes number and their spectral locations.