Nanostructured photon management for high performance solar cells

Advanced photon management, involving both absorption enhancement and reflection reduction, is critical to all the photovoltaic devices. Here we discuss a novel solar cell structure with an efficient photon management design. The centerpiece of the design is the nanocone structure, which is fabricated by a scalable low temperature process. With this design, devices with very thin active layer can achieve near perfect absorption because of both efficient antireflection and absorption enhancement over a broad band of spectra and a wide range of angles of incidence. The device performance of this design is significantly better compared to conventional devices. More excitingly, the design and process is in principle not limited to any specific materials, hence it opens up exciting opportunities for a variety kinds of photovoltaic devices, to further improve the performance, reduce materials usage, and relieve the abundance limitation.