Limiting efficiency of silicon solar cells under highly concentrated sunlight

Recent work has shown that the upper bound on the energy conversion efficiency of silicon cells under concentrated sunlight lies in the 36-37-percent range regardless of the concentration ratio. These bounds are reassessed at very high cencentration levels where loss of conductivity modulation and loss in carrier collection efficiency due to Auger effects become important. Previous work is shown to overestimate the efficiency bound at such levels as well as the cell thickness required to attain this bound.