Study of optical properties of diamond-like carbon/porous silicon antireflective coating layers for multicrystalline silicon solar cell applications

In this work, a study on some optical properties of diamond-like carbon (DLC) films is presented. The DLC films have been deposited by DC discharge plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). The deposited layers have been characterized by spectrophotometry, ellipsometry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis. The result shows that the C–Si ratio evolves with the DLC thickness to reach 70%, indicating high carbon content in the DLC films. In addition, the evolution of optical properties for different DLC thickness layers has been correlated with the FTIR spectra change, where it clearly appears that the DLC films thickness affects the reflectance spectra, the optimal reduction in reflectance loss is observed at a thickness of 53 nm.