Single GaAs nanowire Schottky solar cell with a record high efficiency of~17%

• 作 者: NingHan[1]YunfaChen[1]JohnnyC.Ho[2]
• 机 构: State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Complex Systems,Institute of Process Engineering,Chinese Academy
• 出 处: The 6th International Conference on Nanoscience and Technolo
• 发表日期: 2015年期

　　Solar energy utilizations in the form of photovoltaics are vastly investigated in order to provide enough clean energy after the fossil energy era.However,it is still a great challenge to fabricate solar cells with the high efficiency and low cost aimed at the third generation photovoltaics,though the material consumption will be greatly reduced in the nanometer scale.In this study,highly crystalline,long and dense GaAs nanowires(NWs)are synthesized on amorphous SiO2/Si substrates in the solid source chemical vapor deposition(CVD)system,avoiding the use of expensive single crystalline epitaxial substrates(e.g.GaAs(111)B)in metal-organic(MO)CVD or molecular beam epitaxy(MBE)methods [1].Then,the single NWs are fabricated into Schottky contact solar cells [2] by a simple ultraviolet photolithography process getting rid of the complicated p-i-n structures complementation.Besides these low-cost advantages of the NW synthesis and device fabrication,the horizontal NW solar cell show a record high efficiency of~17%under air mass 1.5 global(AM 1.5G)illumination.This produces another record in addition to the vertically aligned p-i-n GaAs NW solar cells previously reported,in which the superior photovoltaic performance is attributed to the light concentrating effect of NWs with diameter in the order of light wavelength [3].All these results show the promising prospect of the high quality GaAs NWs synthesis in low cost solid source CVD system,and the highly efficient photovoltaic applications in the simple Schottky contact configuration.