Positional disorder in nanowire array photovoltaics

Nanowire arrays are the focus of considerable research for incorporation into next generation solar cells. For these structures to be economically viable they must be designed to achieve high efficiencies in the presence of fabrication variations. Here we report on a systematic study of arrays of clustered nanowires, which reveals how the underlying physics of absorption enhancement in nanowire arrays is altered by the introduction of positional disorder. We find that positional disorder in fact enhances absorption efficiency over the majority of the parameter space due to the formation of additional modes in the structure and subsequently broadened absorption peaks.