Comparison of optical properties of periodic photonic–plasmonic and randomly textured back reflectors for nc-Si solar cells

Blue photon management by inhouse grown ZnO:Al cathode for enhanced photostability in polymer solar cells

“…Next ZnO:Al can be easily deposited by RF magnetron sputtering with optimized electrical and optical property [27,28,29,30]. Finally thicker ZnO:Al TCO can also be etched easily by dipping the film coated on glass in diluted HCl as per etching recipe reported elsewhere [31], to obtain random roughened structure which can be used as both front and back end reflector that can scatter and rebound the incoming light resulting in increasing the light path inside the active medium of solar cell [32,33].…”

Photonic and plasmonic structures for enhancing efficiency of thin film silicon solar cells

“…The basic idea is that silver has a higher affinity towards clustering than other materials and hence it tries to bond to other silver atoms close by and forms spherical shaped clusters to minimize energy, or go to its most favored state. This property of silver is used by various groups [89][90][91][92] to form what is known as annealed or agglomerated or hot silver. The process followed is to either deposit silver on a hot substrate or deposit silver and then heat at higher temperatures.…”

“…The periodic structures are defined as a single unit cell translated in various directions where the theoretical models and structure are predesigned by using various procedures to predict the light trapping effects and experiments follow. There are various groups that work in this area to develop new methods of light trapping using mostly nanostructures of different geometry at particular density to achieve higher absorption in the active layer [36,38,75,76,83,90,. There are various periodic structures which may be 1-D, 2-D or 3-D and they can be used for light trapping.…”

“…The next method is to incorporate nanoparticles in the absorber to get localized plasmonic enhancement by increasing the optical absorption especially close to the metal surface plasmons which create increase light intensity and therefore an increase in optical absorption as shown in Figure 2.31(b), while this method would lead to localized plasma it is more difficult in processing without avoiding defects due to metal incorporation. Figure 2.31(c) shows use of metal structure at the back where if periodic structures exist there can be photonic wave guiding modes or even surface plasmon polariton (SPP) modes can be formed which would propagate parallel to the surface of the metal and there would be a decaying field into the semiconductor [83,90,134,179]. There has been a lot of work to analyze the effect of plasmonic interaction in solar cells not only in thin film solar cells [177,[180][181][182][183][184], but also in organic based solar cells, dye sensitized solar cells [185][186][187][188][189][190], and also crystalline solar cells [191].…”

“…al. [117] Biswas group simulate structures which combine both photonic and plasmonic structures and they predict that it can lead to enhancement over the 4n 2 limit also [75,83,90,136,193].…”