High performance tunnel junction with resistance to thermal annealing

Bedair, S. M.; Carlin, C. Zachary; Harmon, Jeffrey L.; Sayed, Islam; Colter, P. C.

doi:10.1063/1.4962071

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Additional studies discussed later in this paper use MOCVD growth and investigated optical absorption, higher tunneling current, and incorporation into cells. Recent studies include modeling and development of very high-performance structures [17][18][19].…”

Section: Studies Of Various Tunnel Junctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 6a shows the band diagram for a heterojunction with a GaAs quantum well at the interface. After the improved annealing performance with low growth rate and early Te cut-off was discovered [18] a more sophisticated modeling effort was undertaken. Since the constant field approximation from the HRL paper would not be applicable to the structure with the quantum well, the tunneling current was calculated using the Esaki expression for tunneling in a given field and numerically integrating Poisson's equation across the junction using a transfer matrix approach taking the expected band narrowing and band offsets into account [19].…”

Section: Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Tunnel Junctions for III-V Multijunction Solar Cells Review

2018

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Tunnel Junctions, as addressed in this review, are conductive, optically transparent semiconductor layers used to join different semiconductor materials in order to increase overall device efficiency. The first monolithic multi-junction solar cell was grown in 1980 at NCSU and utilized an AlGaAs/AlGaAs tunnel junction. In the last 4 decades both the development and analysis of tunnel junction structures and their application to multi-junction solar cells has resulted in significant performance gains. In this review we will first make note of significant studies of III-V tunnel junction materials and performance, then discuss their incorporation into cells and modeling of their characteristics. A Recent study implicating thermally activated compensation of highly doped semiconductors by native defects rather than dopant diffusion in tunnel junction thermal degradation will be discussed. AlGaAs/InGaP tunnel junctions, showing both high current capability and high transparency (high bandgap), are the current standard for space applications. Of significant note is a variant of this structure containing a quantum well interface showing the best performance to date. This has been studied by several groups and will be discussed at length in order to show a path to future improvements.

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Section: Studies Of Various Tunnel Junctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tunnel Junctions for III-V Multijunction Solar Cells Review

2018

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In-situ curvature monitoring and X-ray diffraction study of InGaAsP/InGaP quantum wells

Sayed

Jain

Steiner

et al. 2017

Journal of Crystal Growth

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100-period InGaAsP/InGaP superlattice solar cell with sub-bandgap quantum efficiency approaching 80%

Sayed

Jain

Steiner

et al. 2017

Applied Physics Letters

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InGaAsP/InGaP quantum well (QW) structures are promising materials for next generation photovoltaic devices because of their tunable bandgap (1.50–1.80 eV) and being aluminum-free. However, the strain-balance limitations have previously limited light absorption in the QW region and constrained the external quantum efficiency (EQE) values beyond the In0.49Ga0.51P band-edge to less than 25%. In this work, we show that implementing a hundred period lattice matched InGaAsP/InGaP superlattice solar cell with more than 65% absorbing InGaAsP well resulted in more than 2× improvement in EQE values than previously reported strain balanced approaches. In addition, processing the devices with a rear optical reflector resulted in strong Fabry-Perot resonance oscillations and the EQE values were highly improved in the vicinity of these peaks, resulting in a short circuit current improvement of 10% relative to devices with a rear optical filter. These enhancements have resulted in an InGaAsP/InGaP superlattice solar cell with improved peak sub-bandgap EQE values exceeding 75% at 700 nm, an improvement in the short circuit current of 26% relative to standard InGaP devices, and an enhanced bandgap-voltage offset (Woc) of 0.4 V.

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High performance tunnel junction with resistance to thermal annealing

Cited by 5 publications

References 9 publications

Tunnel Junctions for III-V Multijunction Solar Cells Review

Tunnel Junctions for III-V Multijunction Solar Cells Review

In-situ curvature monitoring and X-ray diffraction study of InGaAsP/InGaP quantum wells

100-period InGaAsP/InGaP superlattice solar cell with sub-bandgap quantum efficiency approaching 80%

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