Embedded Metal Electrode for Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Nanowire Solar Cells

摘要

We demonstrate here an embedded metal electrode for highly efficient organic inorganic hybrid nanowire solar cells. The electrode proposed here is an effective alternative to the conventional bus and finger electrode which leads to a localized short circuit at a direct Si/metal contact and has a poor collection efficiency due to a nonoptimized electrode design. In our design, a Ag/SiO2 electrode is embedded into a Si substrate while being positioned between Si nanowire arrays underneath poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS), facilitating suppressed recombination at the Si/Ag interface and notable improvements in the fabrication reproducibility. With an optimized microgrid electrode, our 1 cm(2) hybrid solar cells exhibit a power conversion efficiency of up to 16.1% with an open-circuit voltage of 607 mV and a short circuit current density of 34.0 mA/cm(2). This power conversion efficiency is more than twice as high as that of solar cells using a conventional electrode (8.0%). The microgrid electrode significantly minimizes the optical and electrical losses. This reproducibly yields a superior quantum efficiency of 99% at the main solar spectrum wavelength of 600 nm. In particular, our solar cells exhibit a significant increase in the fill factor of 78.3% compared to that of a conventional electrode (61.4%); this is because of the drastic reduction in the metal/contact resistance of the 1 mu m-thick Ag electrode. Hence, the use of our embedded microgrid electrode in the construction of an ideal carrier collection path presents an opportunity in the development of highly efficient organic inorganic hybrid solar cells.