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Surface plasmon polariton enhanced ultrathin nano-structured CdTe solar cell

Ting S. Luk, Nche T. Fofang, Jose L. Cruz-Campa, Ian Frank, and Salvatore Campione

Open Access Open Access

Abstract

We demonstrate numerically that two-dimensional arrays of ultrathin CdTe nano-cylinders on Ag can serve as an effective broadband anti-reflection structure for solar cell applications. Such devices exhibit strong absorption properties, mainly in the CdTe semiconductor regions, and can produce short-circuit current densities of 23.4 mA/cm2, a remarkable number in the context of solar cells given the ultrathin dimensions of our nano-cylinders. The strong absorption is enabled via excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) under plane wave incidence. In particular, we identified the key absorption mechanism as enhanced fields of the SPP standing waves residing at the interface of CdTe nano-cylinders and Ag. We compare the performance of Ag, Au, and Al substrates, and observe significant improvement when using Ag, highlighting the importance of using low-loss metals. Although we use CdTe here, the proposed approach is applicable to other solar cell materials with similar absorption properties.

© 2014 Optical Society of America

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Figures (5)
Fig. 1
Fig. 1 (a) 3D schematic of an array of CdTe nano-cylinders on Ag substrate. The CdTe nano-cylinders have a diameter of 340 nm and a height of 110 nm. The periodicity is 440 nm. (b) Reflectivity spectrum of the nano-patterned structure of CdTe nano-cylinders on Ag substrate (blue curve) and unpatterned CdTe thin film with the nano-cylinders’ thickness (red curve) from normal incidence plane waves. (c) Electric field intensity plots at the wavelength of 0.8 µm. The plot shows intense fields between CdTe nano-cylinders (dotted rectangles) and also at the interface between the CdTe nano-cylinders and Ag (white dash line). The intense fields at the interface of CdTe and Ag pertain to SPPs.

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Fig. 2
Fig. 2 (a) SPP dispersion obtained from FDTD simulations of an array of CdTe nano-cylinders on Ag substrate (red dots) and unpatterned CdTe thin film on Ag substrate (blue diamonds). The red dots are obtained by extracting SPP wavelengths from electric field intensity plots such as shown in (b-d). The dash gray line represents the light line in air. (b)-(d) Electric field intensity plots at wavelengths: 0.5 µm, 0.67 µm and 0.75 µm. Color map of the field is as in Fig. 1(c).

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Fig. 3
Fig. 3 Absorption spectra of arrays of CdTe nano-cylinders on (a) Ag, (b) Au, and (c) Al substrates. The contribution from CdTe (blue), metal (green), and total absorption (red) are separately shown. As expected, the total absorption in red is identical to that obtained from 1-R (black).

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Fig. 4
Fig. 4 (a) Field intensity enhancement versus wavelength and x-coordinate in a unit cell at a distance of 10 nm from the CdTe/Ag interface cutting through the nano-cylinder. The x-axis spans one period (440 nm) of the structure. (b) Similar to (a), showing the spatial absorption contour. It is evident that most of the absorption resides within the CdTe nano-cylinders. The white dash line shows the location of the CdTe band edge.

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Fig. 5
Fig. 5 Absorption spectra as in Fig. 3(a) for a complete photovoltaic circuit obtained including a second conducting electrode implemented with insulating SiO2 and conductive ITO as shown in the inset. Here, ITO and SiO2 are treated as lossless dielectrics.

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