Search

Silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells are one of the promising technologies for next‐generation high‐efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells in photovoltaic industry. Recently, an interesting light‐induced performance enhancement (LIE) effect has been observed in SHJ solar cells. Herein, the kinetics and stability of the LIE effect during repeated cycles of light soaking and subsequent dark annealing at 150 °C are investigated. It is found that VOC of SHJ solar cells increases with light soaking time following stretched exponential, but can be reverted by subsequent dark annealing. This means that LIE effect in SHJ solar cells is not stable. The underlying mechanism of this phenomenon should be attributed to the hydrogen motion in a‐Si:H layers. It is also demonstrated that increasing illumination intensity leads to faster (shorter time constant) and stronger (higher saturation level of ΔVOC) LIE effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) sensors are a useful tool for biomolecule detection, offering label-free and real-time monitoring characteristics. However, traditional SPR sensors still face the challenges of limited detection sensitivity, especially for sensing small molecules with a low concentration level (less than 1 pM (10−12 mol/L)). To overcome this challenge, in this paper, we designed a Kretschmann configuration which uses a plasmonic waveguide to generate a powerful Fano resonance through the coupling of the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode and photonic waveguide (PWG) mode at the sensing interface. By optimizing the thickness of the layers of the metamaterial structure, it is also possible to adjust the resonance angle, the reflectivity, the quality factor (Q factor), the intensity sensitivity, the angular sensitivity and the detection range. In our designed subwavelength grating waveguides (SWG) structure sensor, the intensity sensitivity reached 1.808 × 104 RIU−1, which surpassed the intensity sensitivity of uniform Si layers by 5.14 times. This approach provides a framework for physicists and biologists to develop the future generation of medical diagnostic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have demonstrated that the edge recombination effect exists in full area industrial silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells, which can cause significant short-circuit current density (JSC) loss. The mechanism behind this observation was studied using different SHJ cell structures. We demonstrated further that this JSC loss effect can be suppressed effectively by simply controlling the gap between the edge of the transparent conductive oxide layer and that of the cell. Using this strategy, the average JSC of our state-of-art SHJ solar cells was enhanced by 0.36 mA/cm2, resulting in an average efficiency gain of 0.28% absolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]