Scattering effect of the high-index dielectric nanospheres for high performance hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin-film solar cells

Dielectric nanosphere arrays are considered as promising light-trapping designs with the capability of transforming the freely propagated sunlight into guided modes. This kinds of designs are especially beneficial to the ultrathin hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells due to the advantages of using lossless material and easily scalable assembly. In this paper, we demonstrate numerically that the front-sided integration of high-index subwavelength titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanosphere arrays can significantly enhance the light absorption in 100 nm-thick a-Si:H thin films and thus the power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of related solar cells. The main reason behind is firmly attributed to the strong scattering effect excited by TiO2 nanospheres in the whole waveband, which contributes to coupling the light into a-Si:H layer via two typical ways: 1) in the short-waveband, the forward scattering of TiO2 nanospheres excite the Mie resonance, which focuses the light into the surface of the a-Si:H layer and thus provides a leaky channel; 2) in the long-waveband, the transverse waveguided modes caused by powerful scattering effectively couple the light into almost the whole active layer. Moreover, the finite-element simulations demonstrate that photocurrent density (Jph) can be up to 15.01 mA/cm(2), which is 48.76% higher than that of flat system.