Article
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Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
Light Management in Single Rectangular Silicon Nanowires for Photovoltaic Applications
Version 1
: Received: 27 November 2020 / Approved: 27 November 2020 / Online: 27 November 2020 (20:22:58 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 8 February 2021 / Approved: 8 February 2021 / Online: 8 February 2021 (11:38:12 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 8 February 2021 / Approved: 8 February 2021 / Online: 8 February 2021 (11:38:12 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Abstract
Light management in single nanowires (NWs) is of great importance for photovoltaic applications. However, square NWs (SNWs) can limit their light-trapping ability due to high geometrical symmetry. In this work, we present a detailed study of light management in single silicon NWs with a rectangular cross-section (RNWs). We demonstrate that the RNWs exhibit significantly enhanced light-harvesting compared with the SNWs, which can be attributed to the symmetry-broken structure that can orthogonalize the direction of light illumination and the leaky mode resonances (LMRs). That is, the rectangular cross-section can simultaneously increase the light path length by increasing the vertical side and reshape the LMR modes by decreasing the horizontal side. We found that the light absorption can be engineered via tuning the horizontal and vertical sides, the photocurrent is significantly enhanced by 276.5% or 82.9% in comparison with that of the SNWs with the same side length as the horizontal side of 100 nm or the vertical side of 1000 nm, respectively. This work advances our understanding of how to improve light-harvesting based on the symmetry breaking from the SNWs to RNWs and provides an effective way for designing high-efficiency single NW photovoltaic devices.
Keywords
silicon; single nanowires; rectangular cross-section; absorption; photocurrent
Subject
MATERIALS SCIENCE, Nanotechnology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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