Fundamental limit of nanophotonic light trapping in solar cells
By Zongfu Yu, Aaswath Pattabhi Raman, Shanhui Fan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
809 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Establishing the fundamental limit of nanophotonic light-trapping schemes is of paramount importance and is becoming increasingly urgent for current solar cell research. The standard theory of light trapping demonstrated that absorption enhancement in a medium cannot exceed a factor of 4n2/ sin2θ, where n is the refractive index of the active layer, and θ is the angle of the emission cone in the medium surrounding the cell. This theory, however, is not applicable in the nanophotonic regime. Here we develop a statistical temporal coupled-mode theory of light trapping based on a rigorous electromagnetic approach. Our theory reveals that the conventional limit can be substantially surpassed when optical modes exhibit deep-subwavelength-scale field confinement, opening new avenues for highly efficient next-generation solar cells.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d17043ce2a8a889c4d792d6569e35e056d2be3c
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Citations in the corpus
- S4 : A free electromagnetic solver for layered periodic structures (2012, background): “In addition, S4 has already been used in the investigation of a diverse set of phenomena, including optical forces [53], biosensing [54], optical isolation [55], and light-trapping in solar cells [56].”
- Plasmonic materials for energy: From physics to applications (2013, background): “2(c)), which enables exceeding the bulk absorption limit at select frequencies [45, 46, 53, 54].”
- Organic Solar Cells: A Review of Materials, Limitations, and Possibilities for Improvement (2013, background): “This has been the motivation for several publications about P3OT= graphene and P3HT=graphene nanocomposites (Liu et al. 2008; Q. Liu et al. 2009; Chang et al. 2010; Yang et al. 2010; Yu et al. 2010; Potts et al. 2011; Saini et al. 2012).”
- Self-assembly of highly efficient, broadband plasmonic absorbers for solar steam generation (2016, background): “Therefore, there are generally three critical elements in the design of ideal absorbers: efficient antireflection (15, 16), high density of optical modes (10, 17), and strong light coupling for efficient absorption.”
- Nanomoulding of transparent zinc oxide electrodes for efficient light trapping in solar cells (2011, background): “Consequently, nanomoulding provides full flexibility in designing light-trapping structures, moving one step further towards the fundamental limits for photonic light trapping predicted by theor”
- Optical absorbers based on strong interference in ultra‐thin films (2016, background): “This limit is often used to gauge the effectiveness of light-trapping approaches, though it is not applicable in the cases of materials with large losses, or if special nanophotonic trapping mechanisms are used [67].”