The n-type Si-based materials applied on the front surface of IBC-SHJ solar cells Project supported by the National Key Research Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFB1500500 and 2018YFB1500200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51602340, 51702355, and 61674167), and JKW Project, China (Grant No. 31512060106)

Interdigitated back contact silicon hetero-junction (IBC-SHJ) solar cells exhibit excellent performance owing to the IBC and SHJ structures. The front surface field (FSF) layer composed of electric field passivation and chemical passivation has been proved to play an important role in IBC-SHJ solar cells. The electric field passivated layer n+-a-Si: H, an n-type Si alloy with carbon or oxygen in amorphous phase, is simulated in this study to investigate its effect on IBC-SHJ. It is indicated that the n+-a-Si: H layer with wider band gap can reduce the light absorption on the front side efficaciously, which hinders the surface recombination of photo-generated carriers and thus contributes to the improvement of the short circuit current density Jsc. The highly doped n+-a-Si: H can result in the remakable energy band bending, which makes it outstanding in the field passivation, while it makes little contribution to the chemical passivation. It is noteworthy that when the electric field intensity exceeds 1.3 × 105 V/cm, the efficiency decrease caused by the inferior chemical passivation is only 0.16%. In this study, the IBC-SHJ solar cell with a front n+-a-Si: H field passivation layer is simulated, which shows the high efficiency of 26% in spite of the inferior chemical passivation on the front surface.