Performance Improvement of Ultrathin CIGS Solar Cells Using Al Plasmonic Nanoparticles: The Effect of the Position of Nanoparticles

CIGS solar cells are regarded to be one of the best thin film solar cells with efficiencies up to 22.6%, which exceeds the current multicrystalline Si record efficiency (21.9%). To make the promising CIGS solar cells more economic, reduction of costly In and Ga elements through thinning of CIGS layer seems necessary. But, it causes the cell performance degradation. This study is aimed to investigate the efficiency enhancement of ultrathin CIGS solar cells by using of Al plasmonic nanoparticles. Plasmonic nanoparticles can restrict, absorb, navigate or scatter the incident light. The role of different location of Al nanoparticles within the active layer was studied through optical and electrical simulation utilizing FDTD and DEVICE solvers of Lumerical software. By using the spherical Au nanoparticles, the light absorption in the cell increased drastically. The highest ç=15.31% was achieved for the designed ultrathin CIGS solar cell decorated by Al nanoparticles located in the middle of the absorber layer.