title: Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss.
abstract: The cost-effectiveness of market-dominating silicon wafer solar cells plays a key role in determining the competiveness of solar energy with other exhaustible energy sources. Reducing the silicon wafer thickness at a minimized efficiency loss represents a mainstream trend in increasing the cost-effectiveness of wafer-based solar cells. In this paper we demonstrate that, using the advanced light trapping strategy with a properly designed nanoparticle architecture, the wafer thickness can be dramatically reduced to only around 1/10 of the current thickness (180 μm) without any solar cell efficiency loss at 18.2%. Nanoparticle integrated ultra-thin solar cells with only 3% of the current wafer thickness can potentially achieve 15.3% efficiency combining the absorption enhancement with the benefit of thinner wafer induced open circuit voltage increase. This represents a 97% material saving with only 15% relative efficiency loss. These results demonstrate the feasibility and prospect of achieving high-efficiency ultra-thin silicon wafer cells with plasmonic light trapping.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Micro-Photonics, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
authors.forename: Yinan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Centre for Micro-Photonics, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
authors.forename: Nicholas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Stokes
authors.affiliation: Centre for Micro-Photonics, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
authors.forename: Baohua
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, United States.
authors.forename: Shanhui
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fan
authors.affiliation: Centre for Micro-Photonics, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gu