Consequences of misfit and threading dislocations on PV device design

The relative weights of surface recombination, misfit dislocation density and threading dislocation density in the performance of a photovoltaic device are ascertained in the generation-recombination operating limit of a planar HgCdTe double layer heterostructure. In this limit, surface recombination is found to be much less important than the dislocations, while the balance between misfit and threading dislocations is determined by the relative size of the average misfit segment length and the device lateral dimension.