title: Role of surface plasmon polaritons and photonic modes in light absorption by thin-film solar cells patterned with metallic nanogratings.
abstract: Light absorption by thin-ﬁlm amorphous Si solar cells patterned with metallic nanogratings is investigated theoretically. Propagative bounded modes that include the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) and the photonic mode (PM) are extracted from the total field to quantitatively evaluate their contribution to the light absorption. Our results show that after removing the propagative bounded modes from the total field, the residual field still contributes to a major part of the total light absorption. This proves, at a quantitative level, that the light absorption of the structure is largely attributed to the residual field that is composed of unbounded or evanescent modes arising from the grating scattering, and the SPP and the PM do not play a dominant role, which is out of the previous intuitive expectations.
authors: State Key Laboratory of Precision Measuring Technology and Instruments, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China.
authors: Pan
authors: P
authors: Chen
authors: Ying
authors: Y
authors: Zhong
authors: Haitao
authors: H
authors: Liu