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Irrespective of the success on reduction of contact resistivity, lack of chemical passivation of evaporated metal oxides heavily hinders their applications as passivating contacts, such contacts can be an alternative route for high efficiency and cost effective silicon solar cells. Here, we demonstrate that electron beam evaporated magnesium oxide (MgOx) thin film can work as a promising electron-selective passivating contact for n-Si solar cells after a post-annealing treatment and an alumina-initiated atomic hydrogenation. 10 nm MgOx on n-Si provided a surface recombination velocity down to 14.9 cm/s while 1 nm MgOx showed a low contact resistivity of 14 mΩ cm2. Comprehensive characterizations revealed the formation of Si–O–Mg bonds and the activation of atomic hydrogens were the main reasons for such high-level passivation. A PERC-like dopant-free rear contact was formed by using the 1 nm-MgOx as electron-collector and the 10 nm-MgOx as passivating layer, the resultant solar cells achieved 27% increment in efficiency and 51 mV increase in open-circuit voltage in comparison with reference devices. The ways of improving passivation quality of MgOx and novel design of contact structure open up the possibility of using evaporation-processed metal oxides as effective and low-cost carrier-selective passivating contacts for n-Si photovoltaic devices.

Black silicon (b-Si) with nanotextures is a promising light-trapping scheme for potentially achieving high conversion efficiency at reduced manufacturing cost in crystalline-silicon solar cells. However, the inherently high aspect-ratio and tiny feature size of the nanostructures are subject to severe surface (large surface areas) and Auger recombination (worse doping profile). These will abate the cost values of b-Si since one has to adopt a comprise strategy of applying shallow nanotextures with antireflection and passivation layers. Here, we show that silicon microwire solar cells featuring well-defined radial junctions can extensively suppress both surface and Auger recombination by providing excellent all-around electrical field. The radially doped silicon micropillar devices even show an internal quantum efficiency as good as that of planar substrate and their measured minority carrier lifetimes become nearly independent of total surface area. A great reduction in short-circuit current density loss was further identified as the junction abruptly changed from a fully diffused to a core-shell configuration, manifesting the powerful effectiveness of radial p-n+ junction on the suppression of Auger recombination. Furthermore, silicon microwire solar cell with a radial junction demonstrates 37% increase in efficiency compared with the reference cell, suggesting a feasible strategy towards high-efficiency solar devices.

For crystalline-silicon (c-Si) solar cells, the interdigitated back contact (IBC) structure has been long known as an efficient way to approach the theoretical limit of efficiency. However, the complexity of fabricating this kind of devices as well as the high dependence on expensive vacuum systems pose concerns about their commercial potential. Here, we demonstrate a novel c-Si IBC solar cell featuring dopant-free heterocontacts for both polarities, i.e. a solution-proceeded PEDOT:PSS film as hole-transporting layer (HTL) and an evaporated magnesium-oxide film as electron-transporting layer (ETL). Our innovatively buried ETL method provides substantial simplification on the architecture and fabrication of the IBC cells and makes it possible to adapt solution-proceeded HTLs while keeping good passivation in gap regions. The IBC solar cell shows an efficiency of 16.3%, with a promising short-circuit current density (Jsc) up to 38.4 mA/cm2. A thorough simulation concerning the influence of pitch size, surface recombination rate (at ETL and gap regions) was conducted, revealing a readily achievable Jsc of 41 mA/ cm 2 and a PCE beyond 22%. Our findings demonstrated a feasibility of using solution method to fabricate high efficiency dopant-free IBC solar cells.

Nanostructured silicon (Si) can provide improved light trapping capacity in Si/organic hybrid solar cells (HSCs) due to its low light reflectance compared with planar Si. However, the poor contact of nanostructured Si/organic interface and serious recombination on the uncovered Si surface can result in an inferior open-circuit voltage ( V OC ) and fill factor ( FF ) for HSCs. Here, we have designed and fabricated a novel cone-shaped Si nanoholes (SiNHs) structures to form a superior interface contact between SiNHs and organic layer by using an advanced metal assisted chemical etching method. In addition, a Cs 2 CO 3 layer was also introduced on the Si back surface to reduce the contact resistance as well as to suppress the surface recombination for the HSCs. With such improvements, a power conversion efficiency (PCE) up to 13.5% was achieved for Si/organic hybrid solar cell with the back passivation layer. This work provided a new strategy to improve the junction quality and performance of nanostructured Si/PEDOT:PSS HSCs.

Dopant-free heterojunction opens new doors to highly efficient silicon solar cells with interdigitated back-contacts (IBC) via an easy hard-mask processing. However, the existence of inevitable overlap between the hole- and electron-transport layers may cause edge leakage and recombination, which will deteriorate the power conversion efficiency. Here we unambiguously determined the edge recombination and recombination losses quantitatively, in combination with detailed comparisons in photovoltaic parameters, dark and light current-voltage (I–V) curves, partially illuminated I–V curves, of the hard-mask processed and the lithography processed IBC devices. Without the interfacial passivation layer, the solar cells fabricated by the hard-mask method suffer severe edge recombination with loss of 3 × 10−4 A and a quite poor fill factor (FF) of ~66%, suggesting that the edge recombination could be another important issue affecting the FF besides the series resistance. With the clear understanding of the edge effect, we finely control the edge overlap, and finally obtained silicon dopant-free solar cells (with of intrinsic amorphous silicon as passivation layer) with over 20% efficiency and 73% FF either by lithography or by hard-mask methods.

Single junction crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells featuring a conventionally doped interdigitated back contact heterojunction (IBC-SHJ) structure has approached a record efficiency of 26.6%, which is very close to the practical limit. However, integrating the interdigital p- and n-type amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) layers on the rear surface of Si substrate is of such complexity, posing problem of heavy dependences on expensive manufacturing techniques including plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition and photolithography. Its commercial potential is thus always being questioned, and to seek an alternative fabrication procedure, which adapts to cost-effective deposition parallel with simple patterning characteristics, has been a primary research target of related subjects. Here, we demonstrated 20.1% efficiency dopant-free IBC-SHJ solar cells by combining evaporated carrier-selective materials (MoOx and LiFx) and two-steps hard masks alignments, delivering substantial simplifications in the architecture and fabrication procedures. We investigated the effect of intrinsic a-Si:H films with different thicknesses on the passivation and contact resistance for both a-Si:H/MoOx and a-Si:H/LiFx contacts, showing 4 nm a-Si:H is better for high efficiency IBC-SHJ solar cells. We also found that the position of the metal target (electrode definition step) and isolation in between the busbar and the Si substrate are highly relevant to leakage and recombination and have great impact on the device performance. The dopant-free IBC-SHJ solar cells demonstrated here manifest enough confidence in our hard mask based fabrication procedure, with great potential for high performance-to-cost ratio in future.