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Electrical consideration and optimization of GaAs solar cell with rear metallic grating

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Abstract

Rear metallic grating have been widely employed for photovoltaics due to their excellent performance in quite efficient light-trapping and photoconversion. Numerical simulation and optimization efforts have been paid in order to design these kinds of plasmonic solar cells for practical applications. However, most of the designs reported are based on optical consideration, the increment of carriers recombination arising from complex interplay of photoelectric coupling effect are neglected, which leads to the mismatch in the theoretical design and practical performance. Therefore, the electrical consideration and optimization for metallic grating solar cells is of significant importance. Plasmonic solar cells with rear metallic grating have been proved to be effective in improving photoelectric conversion efficiency. Traditional consideration and optimization are based on light harvesting via tuning the geometric parameter of the grating, which ignores the electrical processes such as carrier generation, transportation and recombination in both frequency and three-dimensional domains. We present a comprehensive optoelectronic simulation for GaAs solar cells with metallic grating by carefully addressing full-coupled electromagnetic and carrier-transport response. Photocurrent loss arising from surface and bulk recombination are quantified and compared for solar cell with/without rear metallic grating. Our results reveal that rear metallic grating solar cells have great advantages in light harvesting while increase more rear surface recombination significantly at the same time. By using BSF layer, the rear surface recombination is markedly suppressed. Similarly, we can suppress front surface recombination by using window layer. The methodology is general and applicable for other solar cells with complicated configurations, and is helpful to predict the realistic performance of photovoltaic device.

© 2015 Optical Society of America

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