Plasmon-enhanced performance of an ultrathin silicon solar cell using metal-semiconductor core-shell hemispherical nanoparticles and metallic back grating

This paper presents a concept to significantly improve the photocurrent of ultrathin crystalline silicon solar cells using plasmonic hemispherical dielectric-metal (core-shell) nanoparticles and backside gratings. The design of three-dimensional spherical and hemispherical arrays of nanoparticles on top of the surface of 0.8 μm crystalline silicon solar cells was simulated using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. We used the FDTD results to investigate the photocurrent by solving the Poisson and drift diffusion equations. The results indicate an enhancement of between 80% and 93% in the photocurrent for cells with hemispherical Ag and Ag-SiO₂ core-shell nanoparticles, respectively, compared to a cell with spherical nanoparticles. In addition, for obtaining a higher photocurrent, triangular gratings were applied on the back side of the absorber and we obtained a photocurrent of 22 mA/cm². The simulated results indicate that the proposed structures increase the spectral response of thin-film crystalline silicon solar cells over a solar spectrum in the range of 400 nm-1200 nm. Finally, we investigated photocurrent as a function of incidence light angle and concluded that this approach is applicable to various thicknesses and shapes of nanoparticles.