Coaxial-Structured Solar Cells with Silicon Nanostructures

Abstract

Coaxial-structured solar cells with different lengths silicon nanowires (SiNWs) fabricated by e-beam lithography and transformer coupled plasma reactive ion etching (TCP-RIE) were demonstrated in this paper. With the intrinsic amorphous silicon thickness of 15 nm and n-layer thickness of 25 nm, the short-current density and the conversion efficiency of the flat film solar cell were 17.58 mA/cm(2) and 3.16 %, respectively. Furthermore, the short-current density increased from 20.75 to 27.90 mA/cm(2) and the conversion efficiency increased from 3.59 to 4.69 % when the silicon nanowires length was increased from 0.5 to 1 mu m. The proposed coaxial-structured solar cells with SiNWs exhibited nearly 48.42 % efficiency enhancement over the plat film solar cell.