Material- and Process-Tolerant High-Efficiency Solar Cells With Dynamic Recovery of Performance.

Low-cost, highly efficient, and stable solar cells demand low-temperature processing, less stringent criteria on materials, and possibility of dynamic recovery from long-term degradation–a combination of features unachievable from the perspectives of current c-Si technology. To this end, here we propose a novel solar cell architecture with an additional control gate. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed device can achieve excellent efficiency even if the back-surface passivation is suboptimal–thus allowing exploration of a wide variety of materials and low-temperature fabrication processes. Importantly, such solar cells can dynamically offset efficiency loss due to elevated temperature and interface degradation associated with long-term field operation and hence could be of broad interest to the photovoltaics (PV) community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]