Plasmonic Nanostructure Design for Efficient Light Coupling into Solar Cells

Abstract

We demonstrate that subwavelength scatterers can couple sunlight into guided modes in thin film Si and GaAs plasmonic solar cells whose back interface is coated with a corrugated metal film. Using numerical simulations, we find that incoupling of sunlight is remarkably insensitive to incident angle, and that the spectral features of the coupling efficiency originate from several different resonant phenomena. The incoupling cross section can be spectrally tuned and enhanced through modification of the scatterer shape, semiconductor film thickness, and materials choice. We demonstrate that, for example, a single 100 nm wide groove under a 200 nm Si thin film can enhance absorption by a factor of 2.5 over a 10 microm area for the portion of the solar spectrum near the Si band gap. These findings show promise for the design of ultrathin solar cells that exhibit enhanced absorption.

Broadband polarization-independent resonant light absorption using ultrathin plasmonic super absorbers

“…Absorption can also be calculated directly, as the power absorbed in any material depends on the divergence of the Poynting vector and may be calculated by the simple relation P abs = ′′ 1 2 2 / | | we E for non-magnetic materials, where ω is the frequency, ″ is the imaginary part of the dielectric permittivity and E is the total electric fi eld 16 . Electric fi elds are calculated within a volume monitor, and the resulting absorption spectrum for TE polarization is plotted in Figure 5 .…”

Angle insensitive enhancement of organic solar cells using metallic gratings

“…The use of waveguide excitation has been demonstrated [5,28], however previous discussions mainly concerned silicon solar cells. follows the SPP modes, the other modes have their field mostly in the polymer.…”

Plasmas meet plasmonics

“…However, controlling (or even predicting) where hot spots will occur is very challenging. This means particular attention (and thorough modelling efforts) need to be directed at understanding and finding fabrication methods capable of controlling the coupling between plasmonic nanostructures with various sizes, shapes, composition, spacing and orientations [91,[97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107]. The tailoring of NP size, shapes and array properties such as ordering, regularity etc.…”