Development of an economical silicon solar cell

The aim of this project was to investigate a method of growing electronically viable silicon films on inexpensive foreign substrates, with the objective of creating a technology to radically reduce the overall cost of the silicon employed in terrestrial photovoltaic solar energy conversion. The approach employed was to enhance the growth of large silicon crystallites from a restricted nucleation edge by confining arriving silicon atoms to a narrow band traveling across a substrate, i.e., the lateral growth technique (LGT). The efforts employed physical vapor deposition of silicon in a vacuum evaporator and also included subsequent chemical vapor deposition by pyrolysis of silane. Reflection electron diffraction studies of LGT silicon show large crystallization of the films on foreign substrates.