A comprehensive study of the plasmonic thin-film solar cell with the periodic strip structure is presented in this paper. The finite-difference frequency-domain method is employed to discretize the inhomogeneous wave function for modeling the solar cell. In particular, the hybrid absorbing boundary condition and the one-sided difference scheme are adopted. The parameter extraction methods for t...

Hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin films with nanocrystalline silicon inclusions sa /nc-Si:Hd have received considerable attention due to reports of electronic properties comparable to hydrogenated amorphous silicon sa-Si:Hd coupled with an improved resistance to the light-induced formation of defects. In this study, a /nc-Si:H thin films are synthesized via radio-frequency plasma-enhanced che...

We report on a novel optical thin film material, erbium-doped deuterated amorphous carbon, fabricated directly on silicon substrate at room-temperature via controlled thermal evaporation of a Metal-Organic compound in a Plasma-Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition (MO-PECVD) system. High erbium concentrations (up to 2.3 at.%) and room-temperature photoluminescence at 1.54 microm are successfully ...

The ability to characterize the phase of the intrinsic (i) layers incorporated into amorphous silicon [a-Si:H] and microcrystalline silicon [μc-Si:H] thin film solar cells is critically important for cell optimization. In this research, a new method has been developed to extract the thickness evolution of the μc-Si:H volume fraction in mixed phase amorphous + microcrystalline silicon [(a+μc)-Si...

Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin films have been considered for use in solar cell applications because of their significantly reduced cost compared to crystalline bulk silicon, however, their overall efficiency and stability are less than that of their bulk crystalline counterparts. Limited work has been performed on simultaneously solving the efficiency and stability issues of a-Si...

The morphology, composition, and bonding character (carbon hybridization state) of continuous, ultra-thin (thickness ∼60 nm) nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) membranes are reported. NCD films were deposited on a silicon substrate that was pretreated using an optimized, two-step seeding process. The surface after each of the two steps, the as-grown NCD topside and the NCD underside (revealed by etc...

The stability of Ni, Cu, Mo and Au transmission electron microscope (TEM) grids coated with ultra-thin amorphous carbon (alpha-C) or silicon monoxide film is examined by in-situ heating up to a temperature in the range 500-850 degrees C in a transmission electron microscope. It is demonstrated that some grids can generate nano-particles either due to the surface diffusion of metal atoms on amor...

Thin film polycrystalline silicon (pc-Si) on flexible metallic substrates is promising for low cost production of photovoltaic solar cells. One of the attractive methods to produce pc-Si solar cells consists in thickening a large-grained seed layer by epitaxy. In this work, the deposited seed layer is made by aluminium induced crystallization (AIC) of an amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin film on me...

The removal of thin films widely used in photovoltaics as (transparent) electrodes (e.g. SnO2, molybdenum) or solar absorber (e.g. amorphous silicon) materials is studied experimentally using multi-kHz diode-pumped solid state lasers in the visible and infrared spectral region. The film processing (or what is commonly known as P1, P2, or P3 laser scribing) is performed through the film-supporti...