This work demonstrates the fabrication of silicide/silicon based solar cell towards the development of low cost and environmental friendly photovoltaic technology. A heterostructure solar cells using metallic alpha phase (α-phase) aluminum alloyed iron silicide (FeSi(Al)) on n-type silicon is fabricated with an efficiency of 0.8%. The fabricated device has an open circuit voltage and fill-facto...

The screen-printed silver (Ag) thick-film is the most widely used front side contact in industrial crystalline silicon solar cells. The front contacts have the roles of efficiently contacting with the silicon (Si) and transporting the photogenerated current without adversely affecting the cell properties and without damaging the p-n junction. Although it is rapid, has low cost and is simplicity...

Crystalline Si wires, grown by the vapor–liquid–solid (VLS) process, have emerged as promising candidate materials for lowcost, thin-film photovoltaics. Here, we demonstrate VLS-grown Si microwires that have suitable electrical properties for high-performance photovoltaic applications, including long minority-carrier diffusion lengths (Ln [ 30 mm) and low surface recombination velocities (S 70 ...

We use the combination of high-resolution electron microscopy and density-functional theory to study the atomic structure and electronic effects of grain boundaries in polycrystalline photovoltaic materials such as Si, CdTe, CuInSe2, and CuGaSe2. We find that grain boundaries containing dislocation cores create deep levels in Si, CdTe, and CuGaSe2. Surprisingly, however, they do not create deep...

Silicon multi-layered thin films are subject of the recent research to play a key role in solar cell technology. The morphological analyses of the textured nc-Si/a-SiO2 multilayer semiconducting thin films are significant for the fabrication of solar cells. Besides the intrinsic properties, the structural properties have a great impact on the performance based on the quality of the interface be...

The optical and electrical properties of transparent conductive oxides (TCOs), traditionally used in thin-film silicon (TF-Si) solar cells as front-electrode materials, are interlinked, such that an increase in TCO transparency is generally achieved at the cost of reduced lateral conductance. Combining a highly transparent TCO front electrode of moderate conductance with metal fingers to suppor...

Formation of a selective emitter in crystalline silicon solar cells improves photovoltaic conversion efficiency by decoupling emitter regions for light absorption (moderately doped) and metallization (degenerately doped). However, use of a selective emitter in silicon nanowire (Si NW) solar cells is technologically challenging because of difficulties in forming robust Ohmic contacts that interf...

Optical micro/nano-spherical cavities can be designed to confine light by generating resonances in whispering gallery modes (WGM) and then couple them into the substrate through leaky modes, which can be potentially used in thin film solar cells for absorption enhancements. In this work, the transparent ZnO electrodes in a hollow nanosphere (HNS) structure were proposed as WGM resonators to tra...

A low-cost Si nanowire array/perovskite hybrid solar cell is proposed and simulated. The solar cell consists of a Si p-i-n nanowire array filled with CH3NH3PbI3, in which both the nanowires and perovskite absorb the incident light while the nanowires act as the channels for transporting photo-generated electrons and holes. The hybrid structure has a high absorption efficiency in a broad wavelen...