Invited Paper EN+TF-TuA1
Thin Film Silicon Approaches to Future Generations of PV Materials

Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 2:00 pm, Room 108

Silicon is a material of choice for photovoltaic (PV) applications for several reasons. First, there is perhaps more known about the properties and processing of Si than any other semiconductor due to its prominence in electronic devices. In addition, Si is a non-toxic, abundant element that is potentially inexpensive to produce in large quantities. The major problems with Si for use in future PV applications are the inefficient absorption of light due to its electronic band structure and a fundamental limit on the efficiency of any single junction bulk device due to transmission of photons below the optical band gap energy and loss of energy to heat for photons above the optical gap energy (so-called Shockly Queiser limit). Nanostructured films of Si have the potential to overcome these problems by decoupling the absorption length for photons from the collection length for carriers and by introducing additional optically excited carriers due to the quantum confinement in nanostructured films. The most promising possibilities for more efficiently exciting and collecting carriers include the production of more than one electron-hole pair per absorbed photon for photon energies greater than twice the optical gap energy, the absorption of photons of below gap energies by the introduction of an intermediate band of states within the optical energy gap due to the inclusion of quantum confined structures with the appropriate properties, and the collection of excited carriers before they lose their energy to phonons. Progress in utilizing these mechanisms for dramatically increasing the efficiencies of future PV devices based on Si will be discussed.