Heterojunction Photovoltaic Systems with Plasmon Enhanced Efficiency

Improving the efficiency of photovoltaic cells is one of the main directions of today's energy challenge. One of the encouraging methods for this is the use of the generation of plasmons in a photovoltaic structure under the influence of solar radiation. For this purpose, metal nanostructures can be used embedded in a semiconductor p-n junction of a photovoltaic cell. In this work, we investigated the heterojunction semiconductor structure of ZnO:Al grown the single-crystalline Si surface. To create the plasmon effect, the nanosized island thin Au film was placed between the semiconductors. All thin films used in the system were grown by the magnetron sputtering method. To compare the effect of the gold interlayer on the properties of solar cells, two series of samples were prepared simultaneously with one difference - a thin gold layer in some of the samples. The measured generated current and voltage are significantly increased compared to the same structure without a gold interlayer, about 10 times. In this work, we present an experimental confirmation of the increase in the efficiency of photoelectric conversion due to the generation of plasmons in gold nanoislands. Nanosized gold islands produce additional resonant electrons when exposed to sunlight and inject them into the conductive zone of the emitter layer. Thus, the efficiency of the photovoltaic cells is greatly increased