Temperature dependence of minority carrier lifetime in single-crystal and polycrystalline Si solar cells

Abstract

Measurements of minority carrier lifetime in the base region of single-crystal and polycrystalline silicon solar cells have been made using the open-circuit voltage decay method in the temperature range 77–500 K. For single-crystal cells, the lifetime is governed by Hall-Shockley-Read theory in the low-temperature region while significant contribution of band to band Auger recombination is found at high temperatures. A temperature dependence ∼T−n was found for the band to band minority carrier lifetime in the high-temperature region with n∼0.3. In polycrystalline cells, the lifetime is found to increase exponentially with temperature, which is interpreted as due to the presence of recombination barriers on the surface.