How front side plasmonic nanostructures enhance solar cell efficiency

Dielectric roughness on the front surface enhances significantly solar cell efficiency by light trapping in the absorbing layer. However in plasmonic assisted thin silicon solar cells we show, by a detailed analysis of the various mechanisms, that front-surface plasmonic structures enhance the efficiency by a different mechanism—namely the effective broadband forward scattering into the silicon, while trapping (path length enhancement) is relatively small for these structures. The plasmonic local field enhancement contribution is even smaller in this configuration. Based on our study we optimized this “anti-reflection mechanism” by tuning the plasmonic structure such that the spectral location of the more efficiently scattering dipole and quadrupole resonances fit correctly the visible and NIR sun spectrum.

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► We analyze solar cell efficiency enhancement from plasmonic nanostructures.
► All the enhancement mechanisms and their interplay are quantitatively studied.
► We show that the main enhancement mechanism is the broadband forward scattering.
► Tuning the efficiently scattering dipole and quadruple resonances is a key component.
► Enhancement from local field and trapping is shown to be relatively small.