Ultrathin mono-resonant nano photovoltaic device for broadband solar conversion

Nano-resonators can be used in photovoltaics to drastically improve the ability of the device to absorb light and generate photo-carriers, therefore enabling a reduction of the absorber volume. Conventionally, the harvest of the spectrally broad solar spectrum is achieved via the tedious engineering of multiple optical resonances. In this paper, we propose a breakthrough approach, which consists in reducing the solar spectral range with a spectral conversion layer to match only one resonance that can then be easily designed. We use a Maxwell solver and a ray-tracing code to optimize the nano-resonator and its spectral converter. We show that 66.2% optical efficiency can be theoretically achieved in less than 40 nm mean thick absorber while leading to device design enabling collection of photo-generated carriers.