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It is believed that the effectual scattering by earth-abundant Al nanoparticles in combination with photoelectric conversion-efficient GaAs material may help for cost-effective solar cells. Al nanoparticles of various radii embedded at different depths in a Ta2O5-coated GaAs semiconductor have been studied by finite-difference time-domain method for their influence towards spectral absorption rate and photocurrent in GaAs solar cells. The calculated spectral absorption rate and photocurrent show a significant enhancement at the optimal depth for a particular radius of Al nanoparticles, which is explained on the basis of surface plasmon resonance. Al nanoparticles of radius 80 nm embedded just below the antireflection layer of Ta2O5 result a maximum spectral absorption rate of 0.95 that leads to a photocurrent of 30.43 mA/cm2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present work, a thin film solar cell structure consisting of thin GaAs layer, metallic nanoparticle array and aluminum back reflector is proposed and studied to calculate optical absorption and current density using finite difference time domain (FDTD) numerical simulation method. Simulation results show that in comparison to other metallic nanoparticles, aluminum nanoparticles have strong plasmonic scattering effect at optimized period of 100nm and radius 40nm to improve the efficiency of thin film GaAs solar cells through enhancement of current density integrated over solar spectrum by 31% compared to bare thin film GaAs solar cells. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]