Nanostructure back reflector for enhancing the performance of InP nanowire array solar cells

摘要

This paper investigates the enhancement performance of InP nanowire (NW) array solar cells using plasmonic nanostructures. Since plasmonic nanostructures allow the control of fundamental optical processes such as absorption, emission, and reflection at the nanoscale, we employ two different metal-insulator-metal (Au-SiO2-Au) plasmonic nanostructures as a back reflector in square and hexagonal lattices of NW array solar cells. We obtain different properties of the proposed structures including optical absorption and short circuit current density (J(sc)) with the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The performance of these solar cells has been compared with each other. It has been shown that using the stripe arrays in metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure in square lattice leads to the 7.7 enhancement in short circuit current density compared to the bare cell.