Synergistically Enhanced Performance of Ultrathin Nanostructured Silicon Solar Cells Embedded in Plasmonically Assisted, Multispectral Luminescent Waveguides.

Ultrathin silicon solar cells fabricated by anisotropic wet chemical etching of single-crystalline wafer materials represent an attractive materials platform that could provide many advantages for realizing high-performance, low-cost photovoltaics. However, their intrinsically limited photovoltaic performance arising from insufficient absorption of low-energy photons demands careful design of light management to maximize the efficiency and preserve the cost-effectiveness of solar cells. Herein we present an integrated flexible solar module of ultrathin, nanostructured silicon solar cells capable of simultaneously exploiting spectral upconversion and downshifting in conjunction with multispectral luminescent waveguides and a nanostructured plasmonic reflector to compensate for their weak optical absorption and enhance their performance. The 8 µm-thick silicon solar cells incorporating a hexagonally periodic nanostructured surface relief are surface-embedded in layered multispectral luminescent media containing organic dyes and NaYF4:Yb3+,Er3+ nanocrystals as downshifting and upconverting luminophores, respectively, via printing-enabled deterministic materials assembly. The ultrathin nanostructured silicon microcells in the composite luminescent waveguide exhibit strongly augmented photocurrent (∼40.1 mA/cm2) and energy conversion efficiency (∼12.8%) than devices with only a single type of luminescent species, owing to the synergistic contributions from optical downshifting, plasmonically enhanced upconversion, and waveguided photon flux for optical concentration, where the short-circuit current density increased by ∼13.6 mA/cm2 compared with microcells in a nonluminescent medium on a plain silver reflector under a confined illumination.

Multilayer-Grown Ultrathin Nanostructured GaAs Solar Cells as a Cost-Competitive Materials Platform for III-V Photovoltaics.

Large-scale deployment of GaAs solar cells in terrestrial photovoltaics demands significant cost reduction for preparing device-quality epitaxial materials. Although multilayer epitaxial growth in conjunction with printing-based materials assemblies has been proposed as a promising route to achieve this goal, their practical implementation remains challenging owing to the degradation of materials properties and resulting nonuniform device performance between solar cells grown in different sequences. Here we report an alternative approach to circumvent these limitations and enable multilayer-grown GaAs solar cells with uniform photovoltaic performance. Ultrathin single-junction GaAs solar cells having a 300-nm-thick absorber (i.e., emitter and base) are epitaxially grown in triple-stack releasable multilayer assemblies by molecular beam epitaxy using beryllium as a p-type impurity. Microscale (∼500 × 500 µm2) GaAs solar cells fabricated from respective device layers exhibit excellent uniformity (<3% relative) of photovoltaic performance and contact properties owing to the suppressed diffusion of p-type dopant as well as substantially reduced time of epitaxial growth associated with ultrathin device configuration. Bifacial photon management employing hexagonally periodic TiO2 nanoposts and a vertical p-type metal contact serving as a metallic back-surface reflector together with specialized epitaxial design to minimize parasitic optical losses for efficient light trapping synergistically enable significantly enhanced photovoltaic performance of such ultrathin absorbers, where ∼17.2% solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency under simulated AM1.5G illumination is demonstrated from 420-nm-thick single-junction GaAs solar cells grown in triple-stack epitaxial assemblies.