Absorption Enhancement of Ultrathin Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells with Dielectric Si3N4 Nanostructures*

A design of ultrathin crystalline silicon solar cell with Si3N4 circular truncated cone holes (CTCs) arrays on the top is proposed. In this article, we perform an optical simulation of the structure. The finite-difference time-domain method is used to calculate the optical absorption of different periods, radius of top and bottom circles and depth of Si3N4 CTCs. The short-circuit current density generated by the optimized cells (30.17 mA/cm2) is 32.44% more than the value gained by control group (with flat Si3N4). Then adding a layer of back silver to allow us to better analyze optical absorption. Later, we simulate the optimization of the same configuration of different silicon thicknesses and find that our structure does enhance the light absorption. This work uses a combined path towards achieving higher photocurrent ultrathin crystalline silicon solar cells by constructing the texture of anti-reflection coating.