Nanophotonic Light Trapping Leads to Super-Efficient, Ultra-Thin Silicon Solar Cells

Credit: Ames Laboratory

The key lies in the wavelength of light that is trapped and the nanocone arrays used to trap it. Their proposed solar architecture comprises thin flat spacer titanium dioxide layers on the front and rear surfaces of silicon, nanocone gratings on both sides with optimized pitch and height and rear cones surrounded by a metallic reflector made of silver. They then set up a scattering matrix code to simulate light passing through the different layers and study how the light is reflected and transmitted at different wavelengths by each layer.

“This is a light-trapping approach that keeps the light, especially the red and long-wavelength infrared light, trapped within the crystalline silicon cell,” Biswas explained. “We did something similar to this with our amorphous silicon cells, but crystalline behaves a little differently.”

For example, it is critical not to affect the crystalline silicon wafer—the interface of the wafer—in any way, he emphasized. “You want the interface to be completely flat to begin with, then work around that when building the solar cell,” he said. “If you try to pattern it in some way, it will introduce a lot of defects at the interface, which are not good for solar cells. So our approach ensures we don’t disturb that in any way.”

In addition to the cell’s unique architecture, the simulations the researchers ran on NERSC’s Edison system utilized “homegrown” code developed at Ames to model the light via the cell’s electric and magnetic fields—a “classical physics approach,” Biswas noted. This allowed them to test multiple wavelengths to determine which was most optimum for light trapping. To optimize the absorption of light by the crystalline silicon based upon the wavelength, the team sent light waves of different wavelengths into a designed solar cell and then calculated the absorption of light in that solar cell’s architecture. The Ames researchers had previously studied the trapping of light in other thin film solar cells made of organic and amorphous silicon in previous studies.

“One very nice thing about NERSC is that once you set up the problem for light, you can actually send each incoming light wavelength to a different processor (in the supercomputer),” Biswas said. “We were typically using 128 or 256 wavelengths and could send each of them to a separate processor.”

Looking ahead, given that this research is focused on crystalline silicon solar cells, this new design could make its way into the commercial sector in the not-too-distant future—although manufacturing scalability could pose some initial challenges, Biswas noted.

“It is possible to do this in a rather inexpensive way using soft lithography or nanoimprint lithography processes,” he said. “It is not that much work, but you need to set up a template or a master to do that. In terms of real-world applications, these panels are quite large, so that is a challenge to do something like this over such a large area. But we are working with some groups that have the ability to do roll to roll processing, which would be something they could get into more easily.”

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)