Design of periodic metal-insulator-metal waveguide back structures for the enhancement of light absorption in thin-film solar cells

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/20/9/094201

Abstract To increase the absorption in a thin layer of absorbing material (amorphous silicon, a-Si), a light trapping design is presented. The designed structure incorporates periodic metal-insulator-metal waveguides to enhance the optical path length of light within the solar cells. The new design can result in broadband optical absorption enhancement not only for transverse magnetic (TM)-polarized light, but also for transverse electric (TE)-polarized light. No plasmonic modes can be excited in TE-polarization, but because of the coupling into the a-Si planar waveguide guiding modes and the diffraction of light by the bottom periodic structures into higher diffraction orders, the total absorption in the active region is also increased. The results from rigorous coupled wave analysis show that the overall optical absorption in the active layer can be greatly enhanced by up to 40%. The designed structures presented in this paper can be integrated with back contact technology to potentially produce high-efficiency thin-film solar cell devices.

Keywords: thin-film solar cells metal-insulator-metal waveguide enhanced optical absorption rigorous coupled wave analysis

Received: 14 December 2010
Revised: 24 January 2011
Accepted manuscript online:

PACS:	42.15.Eq	(Optical system design)
	42.79.-e	(Optical elements, devices, and systems)
	42.82.Bq	(Design and performance testing of integrated-optical systems)

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Zheng Gai-Ge(郑改革), Jiang Jian-Li(蒋剑莉), Xian Feng-Lin(咸冯林), Qiang Hai-Xia(强海霞), Wu Hong(武虹), and Li Xiang-Yin(李相银) Design of periodic metal-insulator-metal waveguide back structures for the enhancement of light absorption in thin-film solar cells 2011 Chin. Phys. B 20 094201

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Design of periodic metal-insulator-metal waveguide back structures for the enhancement of light absorption in thin-film solar cells

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