Antireflection and absorption properties of silicon parabolic-shaped nanocone arrays

Adding antireflection and light trapping structures to the solar cell can decrease the optical losses and increase the efficiency of the cell effectively, the nanocone antireflection structure was paid lots of attention because of its simple manufacture processes and low reflectance. In this work, the effect of the height and diameter of the periodic unit on the reflectance, transmittance and absorptance of the parabolic-shaped nanocone (PSNC) arrays was calculated using finite-difference time-domain method. It was found that the average reflectance decreased and the average absorptance increased with the increase of height in our calculation range. The average reflectance could be decreased to 0.13% by optimizing the diameter even when the height decreased to 1 μm, thus the PSNC arrays had good antireflection character. The average absorptance could reach 81.16% by optimizing the diameter when the height increased to 7 μm.