TY - JOUR
T1 - Adequacy of the rigorous coupled-wave approach for thin-film silicon solar cells with periodically corrugated metallic backreflectors
T2 - Spectral analysis
AU - Shuba, Mikhail V.
AU - Faryad, Muhammad
AU - Solano, Manuel E.
AU - Monk, Peter B.
AU - Lakhtakia, Akhlesh
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Optical Society of America.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - The rigorous coupled-wave approach (RCWA) is extensively used to compute optical absorption and photon absorption in thin-film photovoltaic solar cells backed by 1D metallic gratings when the wave vector of the incident light lies wholly in the grating plane. The RCWA algorithm converges rapidly for incident s-polarized light over the entire 400-1100 nm solar spectrum. It also performs well for incident p-polarized light in the 400-650 nm spectral regime, but even with a large number of Floquet harmonics in the solution, the total reflectance is underestimated in the 650-1100 nm spectral regime. Despite that shortcoming, the RCWA underestimates the solar-spectrum-integrated photon absorption rate only by 5%-10% for p-polarized light. As sunlight is almost unpolarized, the RCWA should be considered adequate to design thin-film silicon solar cells with periodically corrugated metallic backreflectors.
AB - The rigorous coupled-wave approach (RCWA) is extensively used to compute optical absorption and photon absorption in thin-film photovoltaic solar cells backed by 1D metallic gratings when the wave vector of the incident light lies wholly in the grating plane. The RCWA algorithm converges rapidly for incident s-polarized light over the entire 400-1100 nm solar spectrum. It also performs well for incident p-polarized light in the 400-650 nm spectral regime, but even with a large number of Floquet harmonics in the solution, the total reflectance is underestimated in the 650-1100 nm spectral regime. Despite that shortcoming, the RCWA underestimates the solar-spectrum-integrated photon absorption rate only by 5%-10% for p-polarized light. As sunlight is almost unpolarized, the RCWA should be considered adequate to design thin-film silicon solar cells with periodically corrugated metallic backreflectors.
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U2 - 10.1364/JOSAA.32.001222
DO - 10.1364/JOSAA.32.001222
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84943232806
SN - 1084-7529
VL - 32
SP - 1222
EP - 1230
JO - Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics and Image Science, and Vision
JF - Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics and Image Science, and Vision
IS - 7
ER -