Limitation of Optical Enhancement in Ultra-thin Solar Cells Imposed by Contact Selectivity

Ultra-thin crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cell suffers both from poor light absorption and minority carrier recombination at the contacts resulting in low contact selectivity. Yet most of the research focuses on improving the light absorption by introducing novel light trapping technique. Our work shows that for ultra-thin absorber, the benefit of optical enhancement is limited by low contact selectivity. Using simulation we observe that performance enhancement from light trapping starts to saturate as the absorber scales down because of the increase in probability of the photo-generated carriers to recombine at the metal contact. Therefore, improving the carrier selectivity of the contacts, which reduces the recombination at contacts, is important to improve the performance of the solar cell beyond what is possible by enhancing light absorption only. The impact of improving contact selectivity increases as the absorber thickness scales below 20 micrometer (μm). Light trapping provides better light management and improving contact selectivity provides better photo-generated carrier management. When better light management increases the number of photo-generated carriers, better carrier management is a useful optimization knob to achieve the efficiency close to the thermodynamic limit. Our work explores a design trade-off in detail which is often overlooked by the research community.