Influence of surface plasmon resonances of silver nanoparticles on optical and electrical properties of textured silicon solar cell

Abstract

Here, we report average reflectance reduction of ∼8% in wavelength range of 300–1100 nm after coupling surface plasmon resonances (SPRs) of silver nanoparticles (NPs) to textured silicon (T-Si) surface. The enhancement of photocurrent from T-Si solar cell in off-resonant SPR region observed due to better radiative efficiency of NPs leading to outflow of scattered far-field into silicon maximized power generating electrons. Improvement in series resistance, fill factor, and open-circuit voltage (insensitive NPs size and morphology) are also observed with NPs along with photocurrent enhancement (sensitive to NPs sizes), which resulted cell efficiency enhancement from 4.49% to 6.42% for large area of 12.24 cm2.