Irradiation-induced degradation in solar cell: characterization of recombination centres

Abstract

Although the defects introduced by irradiation in Si and GaAs have been extensively studied, the centres giving rise to non-radiative recombination have been neither characterized nor identified. We propose here a method allowing one to fully characterize recombination centres, i.e. to obtain their electron and hole capture cross sections as well as their concentration. It is based on a correlation between data extracted from the current-voltage characteristics of a junction in dark, deep level transient spectroscopy and the variations of the short-circuit current and open voltage of solar cells versus the logarithm of the irradiation fluence. The method is applied to characterize and tentatively identify the recombination centres introduced by electron irradiation in Si, GaAs and InGaP.

The window layers effect on the hardness improvement of space solar cells exposed to the 1 MeV electron irradiations

“…The cell is placed in a Faraday cup allowing accurate measurement of the fluence with a current integrator. Current-voltage measurements were performed in situ in the accelerator under a 1 AM0 illumination provided by a Xe arc lamp (Bourgoin and Zazoui 2002). Defects induced by electron irradiation in n-and p-type materials have been extensively studied (for a review see Pons and Bourgoin 1985).…”

Gaas Displacement Damage Dosimeter Based on Diode Dark Currents

“…where I 1 * and I 2 * are defined in [16]. Equations (4) and (5) indicates that the diffusion dark current constant has a square root dependence with particle fluence while the recombination dark current constant is linear relationship with fluence (or displacement damage dose when fluence is converted to DDD using NIEL).…”

Swift heavy ion induced capacitance and dielectric properties of Ni/n-GaAs Schottky diode

“…The atomic displacements and vacancies produced upon irradiation in the bulk of the device also have a pronounced role in reducing the minority carrier lifetime. At low fluence, the introduction of non-radiative recombination centers would be prominent whereas at higher fluence it would be the presence of trapping centers that induce a nonnegligible compensation of free carriers [31]. In this perspective, the observed deep depletion effect in the CV plot (Fig.…”