Light-harvesting and photon management in gaas solar cells for photovoltaic-thermoelectric hybrid systems

The utilization of solar energy in photovoltaics is limited due to the band gap of the materials. Hence, photovoltaic - thermoelectric hybrid system was proposed to utilize solar energy in the full spectrum of AM1.5G. On this basis, a novel design of GaAs solar cell is proposed in this paper for the full spectrum absorption in the cell structure, which consists of an ultra-thin GaAs layer with nanocones on the surface and a nanogrid - AZO - Ag back contact. The Finite Difference Time Domain method is used to analyze the full spectrum absorption features for TE and TM polarizations over the incident angles varying from 0° to 60°. The designed structure shows high absorption in the full spectrum. For GaAs layer, it is shown that the solar usable energy for GaAs solar cells in 300 - 900nm is absorbed by GaAs almost perfectly due to the anti - reflection property of the nanocone array. The absorbed energy in the back contact in the longer wavelengths over 900nm is due to the Fabry-Perot and the localized plasmonic resonances. The structure can collect full-spectrum incident photons efficiently in GaAs solar cells for the application of photovoltaic - thermoelectric hybrid system.