Facile fabrication of Si nanowire arrays for solar cell application

Large-area Si nanowire arrays have been fabricated on phosphorus doped Si surface by a facile silver-catalyzed chemical etching process. The solar cell incorporated with Si nanowire arrays shows a power conversion efficiency of 6.69% with an open circuit voltage of 558 mV and a short circuit current density of 25.13 mA/cm2 under AM 1.5 G illumination without using any extra antireflection layer and surface passivation technique. The high power conversion efficiency of Si nanowires based-solar cell is attributed to the low reflectance loss of Si nanowire arrays for incident sunlight. Optimization of electrical contact and phosphorus diffusion process will be critical to improve the performance of Si nanowires-based solar cell in the future.