Photon Management in Thin-Film Solar Cells

Photon management in thin-film solar cells is nowadays indispensable for enhancing their efficiency. We describe various strategies where modern concepts from the field of micro- and nanooptics are exploited for this purpose. While concentrating on single and tandem solid state solar cells, we detail how plasmonic structures, photonic crystals, randomly textured interfaces, or combinations thereof, can be beneficially integrated into solar cells. Peculiar to our theoretical and numerical work is the consideration of structures with geometrical details taken from fabricated devices. We detail how state-of-the-art computational photonics provides insight into the evolution of light in solar cells and show how explicit guidelines for an optimization of the photon management can be derived from adapted simulations.