Novel Hybrid Electrode Using Transparent Conductive Oxide and Silver Nanoparticle Mesh for Silicon Solar Cell Applications

Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) have been widely used as the front electrodes for various solar cell structures, including heterojunction silicon wafer solar cells and the vast majority of thin-film solar cells. For heterojunction silicon wafer solar cells, the front TCO layer not only serves as a top electrode (by enhancing the lateral conductance of the underlying amorphous silicon film), but also as an antireflection coating. These requirements make it difficult to simultaneously achieve excellent conductivity and transparency, and thus only high-quality indium tin oxide (ITO) has as yet found its way into industrial heterojunction silicon wafer solar cells. For thin-film solar cells, in order to provide efficient lateral conductance of the charge carriers, normally a TCO layer of a few hundred nanometers thickness is used which impedes the optical transparency due to the enhanced free carrier absorption. To reduce the conflict between conductivity and transparency, and to separately engineer the electrical and optical properties, a hybrid electrode is proposed and fabricated by us which consists of a TCO layer (optical layer) and a silver nanoparticle mesh (electrical layer). This hybrid electrode is demonstrated to have a 10 times higher lateral conductance compared to a single TCO layer, while maintaining high light transmission in a wide wavelength range. Due to the excellent performance of the hybrid electrode, it is demonstrated that such an electrode is suitable for various solar cell structures.