FP supervised the whole project. FI participated in data interpretation and wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background A common goal for photovoltaic (PV) design is to find effective ways to manage photons and excitons for high conversion efficiency by for example reducing cell reflection loss, improving light absorption of photoactive layers, and increasing charge collection [1]. The rapid progress of PV science has witnessed a lot of advanced light-trapping scenarios and technologies, such as impedance-matched coating [2], moth’s eye

structures [3], optical selleck chemical antennas [4], and photonic crystals [5]. Recent interests also focus on the Fedratinib applications of plasmonics in photovoltaics [6], e.g., by core-shell metallic nanowire design [7] or metallic gratings [8]. However, the strong parasitic absorption brings a big challenge to strictly balance the (negative) parasitic absorption loss and (positive) photocurrent gain of plasmonic solar cells (SCs) [9]. Therefore, conventional dielectric light-trapping structures are still attracting intensive research/application interests.

Among these designs, photonic crystals are usually employed as an effective way to guide and confine the solar incidence, e.g., two-dimensional (2D) backside oxide grating [10] and low- or high-dimensional photonic structures this website [11, 12]. The above designs are mainly dedicated to single-junction SCs. The strong demand for high photoconversion efficiency requires a more efficient use of the

broadband solar incidence, leading to the generations of tandem and multi-junction cells. One important direction is the silicon-based tandem thin-film SCs (TFSCs), which are realized by introducing a layer of hydrogenated microcrystalline click here silicon (μc-Si:H) into conventional amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) SCs [13]. Compared to single-junction cells, a well-designed tandem solar cell has to be the combination of properly designed light trapping, efficient carrier transportation with low carrier loss, and perfectly matched photocurrent. Unlike the ordinary random texture or nanopattern in transparent conductive oxide (TCO), we recently proposed an a-Si:H/μc-Si:H tandem cell by nanopatterning the a-Si:H layer into one-dimensional (1D) grating. It is found that the realistic output photocurrent density (J sc) after current matching treatment can be greatly improved arising from a broadband absorption enhancement, which is stable against the changes of light polarization and injection direction [14]. Although under such a low-dimensional periodic design, a dramatic rise in photocurrent has been predicted in a purely optical means. It is thus reasonable to figure that further improvement could be possible by introducing a high-dimensional photonic crystal as it provides more controllable factors to optimize the PV behavior.