Improvement of carrier collection in Si/a-Si:H nanowire solar cells by using hybrid ITO/silver nanowires contacts

Tiphaine Mathieu-Pennober (1) , Martin Foldyna (2) , Shan-Ting Zhang (3) , François H Julien (1) , Nathanaelle Schneider (3) , Maria Tchernycheva (1)

1 C2N - Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies
2 LPICM - Laboratoire de physique des interfaces et des couches minces [Palaiseau]
3 IPVF - Institut Photovoltaïque d’Ile-de-France (ITE)

Optoelectronic devices based on high aspect ratio nanowires bring new challenges for transparent electrodes, which can be well addressed by using hybrid structures. Here we demonstrate that a composite contact to radial junction nanowire solar cells made of a thin indium-tin oxide (ITO) layer and silver nanowires greatly improves the collection of charge carriers as compared to a single thick ITO layer by reducing the series resistance losses while improving the transparency. The optimization is performed on p-in solar cells comprising of dense non-vertical nanowires with a p-doped c-Si core and an ultra-thin a-Si:H absorption layer grown by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition on glass substrates. The optimal hybrid contact developed in this work is demonstrated to increase the solar cell conversion efficiency from 4.3% to 6.6%.

Domaines: Science des matériaux [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]; Matériaux; Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique; Optique / photonique

Tiphaine Mathieu-Pennober, Martin Foldyna, Shan-Ting Zhang, François H Julien, Nathanaelle Schneider, et al.. Improvement of carrier collection in Si/a-Si:H nanowire solar cells by using hybrid ITO/silver nanowires contacts. Nanotechnology, 2020, 31 (43), pp.435408. ⟨10.1088/1361-6528/aba4ce⟩. ⟨hal-03031135⟩