Optical simulations of advanced light management for liquid-phase crystallized silicon thin-film solar cells

Abstract

Light management is a key issue for highly efficient liquid-phase crystallized silicon (LPC-Si) thin-film solar cells and can be achieved with periodic nanotextures. They are fabricated with nanoimprint lithography and situated between the glass superstrate and the silicon absorber. To combine excellent optical performance and LPC-Si material quality leading to open circuit voltages exceeding 640 mV, the nanotextures must be smooth.Optical simulations of these solar cells can be performed with the finite element method (FEM). Accurately simulating the optics of such layer stacks requires not only to consider the nanotextured glass-silicon interface, but also to adequately account for the air-glass interface on top of this stack. When using rigorous Maxwell solvers like the finite element method (FEM), the air-glass interface has to be taken into account a posteriori, because the solar cells are prepared on thick glass superstrates, in which light is to be treated incoherently.In this contribution we discuss two different incoherent a posteriori corrections, which we test for nanotextures between glass and silicon. A comparison with experimental data reveals that a first-order correction can predict the measured reflectivity of the samples much better than an often-applied zeroth-order correction.