Plasmon-Enhanced Light Absorption in (p-i-n) Junction GaAs Nanowire Solar Cells: An FDTD Simulation Method Study

Abstract

A finite-difference time-domain method is developed for studying the plasmon enhancement of light absorption from vertically aligned GaAs nanowire arrays decorated with Au nanoparticles. Vertically aligned GaAs nanowires with a length of 1 µm, a diameter of 100 nm and a periodicity of 165–500 nm are functionalized with Au nanoparticles with a diameter between 30 and 60 nm decorated in the sidewall of the nanowires. The results show that the metal nanoparticles can improve the absorption efficiency through their plasmonic resonances, most significantly within the near-bandgap edge of GaAs. By optimizing the nanoparticle parameters, an absorption enhancement of almost 35% at 800 nm wavelength is achieved. The latter increases the chance of generating more electron–hole pairs, which leads to an increase in the overall efficiency of the solar cell. The proposed structure emerges as a promising material combination for high-efficiency solar cells.

Plasmon-enhanced parabolic nanostructures for broadband absorption in ultra-thin crystalline Si solar cells

“…39–41 For smaller NPs, lower-order localized surface plasmon modes contribute to the trapped electric field whereas higher-order modes are excited by the larger NPs, coupling more light into the underlying c-Si absorber layer. 30 Simulation results show maximum electric field confinement around the near bandgap wavelength of λ = 1200 nm, when d Au = 40 nm, which is consistent with the absorption enhancement results displayed in Fig. 6.…”

“…[39][40][41] For smaller NPs, lower-order localized surface plasmon modes contribute to the trapped electric eld whereas higher-order modes are excited by the larger NPs, coupling more light into the underlying c-Si absorber layer. 30 Simulation Fig. 7 The normalized electric-field distributions of the bare and Au NP coated parabolic nanostructures for the TM polarized incident light at l = 500 nm, 800 nm, 1000 nm, 1200 nm, and 1500 nm.…”

“…[24][25][26][27][28] But most of the work is limited to planar devices and the use of plasmonic NPs to enable enhanced broadband absorption in textured Si solar cells has rarely been explored. Li et al 29 and Dawi et al 30 used nitedifference time-domain (FDTD) simulations to demonstrate GaAs nanowires decorated with gold (Au) NPs, where the particle size was tuned to obtain 50% and 35% absorption enhancements at 760 nm and 800 nm wavelengths, respectively. In our earlier work, we theoretically investigated plasmon enhancements in light-trapping Si nanowires, nanopyramids and at-topped nanocones embedded with Au NPs and Si quantum dots.…”

Composite Nanostructured Materials for Renewable Energy Applications

“…photoelectrochemical water splitting), ZnO has some limitations (e.g. high recombination rate) that can be optimized using different strategies such as forming composite materials [9][10][11][12],…”

“…5.2. (a) the J-V curves of bare nanowires and nanowires with 60-nm Au nanoparticles; (b) Photoconversion efficiency of nanowires with varying D/P ratios decorated with 60-nm Au NPs.Taken from[9]…”