Silver nanodiscs for light scattering in thin epitaxial silicon solar cells: Influence of the disc radius
Paper in proceeding, 2011

The effect of silver nanoparticles showing localised plasmonic resonances on the efficiency of thin film silicon solar cells is studied. Silver (Ag) nanodiscs were deposited on the surface of silicon cells grown on highly doped silicon substrates, through hole-mask colloidal lithography, which is a low-cost and bottom-up technique. The cells have no back reflector in order to exclusively study the effect of the front surface on their properties. Cells with nanoparticles were compared with both bare silicon cells and cells with an antireflection coating. We optically observe a resonance showing an absorption increase controllable by the disc radius. We also see an increase in efficiency with respect to bare cells, but we see a decrease in efficiency with respect to cells with an antireflection coating due to losses at wavelengths below the plasmon resonance. As the material properties are not notably affected by the particles deposition, the loss mechanism is an important absorption in the nanoparticles. We confirm this by numerical simulations.

Author

O. El Daif

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

Lianming Tong

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Bionanophotonics

B. Figeys

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

S. Jain

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

Vladimir Miljkovic

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Bionanophotonics

V. Depauw

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

D. Vercruysse

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

K. Van Nieuwenhuysen

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

Alexander Dmitriev

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Bionanophotonics

P. Van Dorpe

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

I. Gordon

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

F. Dross

Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center at Leuven

Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings

0272-9172 (ISSN)

Vol. 1391 75-80
978-162748211-0 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Other Engineering and Technologies

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1557/opl.2012.527

ISBN

978-162748211-0

More information

Created

10/7/2017