Kinetics of creation and of thermal annealing of light-induced defects in microcrystalline silicon solar cells

Meillaud, Fanny; Vallat-Sauvain, E.; Shah, A.; Ballif, Christophe

doi:10.1063/1.2844282

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…In the literature, several studies have observed this peak during SERS measurements in a PDMS device; the most convincing identity of this peak is mono- or poly-crystalline silicon. 35,36 For SERS measurements in the flexible SERS sensor, a silicon wafer was always present underneath the flexible SERS devices during measurements to better visualize the channels, which may have led to the sharp Raman peak. Another possibility is that the reactive ion etching chamber is frequently used for silicon etching, and a silicon wafer was present in the chamber during etching of the flexible SERS PDMS layer; as such, the Au nanoparticles may have been exposed to silicon during the etching process.…”

Section: Methods and Experimental Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

Microfluidic-SERS devices for one shot limit-of-detection

Kim

Campos

Datt

et al. 2014

Analyst

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Microfluidic sensing platforms facilitate parallel, low sample volume detection using various optical signal transduction mechanisms. Herein, we introduce a simple mixing microfluidic device, enabling serial dilution of introduced analyte solution that terminates in five discrete sensing elements. We demonstrate the utility of this device with on-chip fluorescence and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) detection of analytes, and we demonstrate device use both when combined with a traditional inflexible SERS substrate and with SERS-active nanoparticles that are directly incorporated into microfluidic channels to create a flexible SERS platform. The results indicate, with varying sensitivities, that either flexible or inflexible devices can be easily used to create a calibration curve and perform a limit of detection study with a single experiment.

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Section: Methods and Experimental Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

Microfluidic-SERS devices for one shot limit-of-detection

Kim

Campos

Datt

et al. 2014

Analyst

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“…It is well known that a light‐induced degradation (LID; Staebler–Wronski effect ) issue exists in amorphous silicon (a‐Si:H) thin‐film solar cells, which leads to a reduction of conversion efficiency to a low and stabilized one. By contrast, the microcrystalline silicon solar cell (µc‐Si:H) shows a very mild LID rate of 5% or less and is considered to be of great importance for technological application. It is even reported that the µc‐Si:H solar cells show almost no LID .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Degradation behavior of hydrogenated amorphous/microcrystalline silicon tandem solar cells

Wang¹,

Zhu²,

Gao³

et al. 2013

Physica Status Solidi (a)

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The degradation behaviors of hydrogenated amorphous/microcrystalline silicon (a‐Si:H/µc‐Si:H) tandem solar cells are systematically investigated. It is found that the degradation of the tandem solar cells takes place not only under the light soaking but also after dark storage. The degradation in the efficiency of tandem solar cells is mainly due to a reduction of fill factor (FF) in our study. Different from light‐induced degradation (LID) behaviors for the tandem solar cells, the degradation behaviors under dark storage, i.e., the dark degradation could be mainly caused by the cracks or voids formed in the bottom µc‐Si:H cell. These defects could lead to an oxidization of internal silicon surfaces by the oxygen atoms. The stabilities of the top a‐Si:H cells and the ZnO:B electrodes are also investigated. Furthermore, adjusting the crystallinity of intrinsic µc‐Si:H material and inserting an intermediate light reflective (ILR) layer between the top cell and bottom cell can improve the performances of the novel structure tandem solar cells. A gain of 0.7% in efficiency is achieved, and meanwhile no dark degradation is observed for the novel tandem solar cells.

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“…It should be noted that, even if mc-Si:H cells with a high crystalline volume fraction of the i-layer (460%) are more stable, their initial and light-soaked values of (0.8 eV) will be larger than those of cells with medium crystallinity. The kinetics of light-induced degradation in mc-Si:H was recently studied to gain further insight into the exact microscopic mechanism behind this degradation effect [80]. It was demonstrated that, similarly to a-Si:H, both the kinetics of defect creation and annealing could be fitted with stretched exponential functions, as used in the dispersive model mentioned earlier.…”

Section: Philosophical Magazinementioning

confidence: 99%