Light Trapping for Thin Silicon Solar Cells by Femtosecond Laser Texturing: Preprint

Conference · Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/PVSC.2012.6317902· OSTI ID:1044436

Lee, Benjamin G.; Lin, Yu-Ting; Sher, Meng-Ju; Mazur, Eric; Branz, Howard M.

Femtosecond laser texturing is used to create nano- to micron-scale surface roughness that strongly enhances light-trapping in thin crystalline silicon solar cells. Light trapping is crucial for thin solar cells where a single light-pass through the absorber is insufficient to capture the weakly absorbed red and near-infrared photons, especially with an indirect-gap semiconductor absorber layersuch as crystalline Si which is less than 20 um thick. We achieve enhancement of the optical absorption from light-trapping that approaches the Yablonovitch limit.

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Solar Energy Technologies Office (EE-4S)
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 1044436
• Report Number(s): NREL/CP-5200-54122
• Conference Information: Presented at the 2012 IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, 3-8 June 2012, Austin, Texas
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

14 SOLAR ENERGY
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
ABSORPTION
epitaxial silicon
femtosecond laser
Lambertian
laser texturing
LASERS
light trapping
PHOTONS
ROUGHNESS
SILICON SOLAR CELLS
SOLAR CELLS
TRAPPING