https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2017-70570-7
Regular Article
Improving optical absorption in a-Si thin films with TiO2 Mie scatterers
1 Nanophotonics – Physics of Devices, Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80000, 3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands
2 Laboratory of Solid State Physics and Magnetism, Department of Physics and Astronomy, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200D, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
3 CIMAINA and Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Milano, via Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, Italy
a
e-mail: marcel.divece@unimi.it
Received: 8 September 2016
Received in final form: 5 February 2017
Published online: 25 April 2017
To increase the optical absorption in very thin a-Si films is relevant for more efficient and inexpensive photovoltaics. In this work we deposited TiO2 particles with a gas aggregation source on top of a-Si thin films and study the effect on optical absorption. When using thin films, anti-reflection and enhanced-reflection occurs depending on the thickness, which was employed in this study. The experiments were compared with finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations which yielded good agreement. Both increased and decreased optical absorption was measured, depending on the photon energy range. This work demonstrates that by tailoring the various parameters, the TiO2 particles can contribute to increasing the efficiency of an a-Si based solar cell.
Key words: Clusters and Nanostructures
© The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
