J-V characteristics of plasmonic photovoltaics with embedded conical and cylindrical metallic nanoparticles

Plasmonic photovoltaics (PVs) are promising structures that improve thin-film photovoltaics performance, where optical absorption is improved via embedding metallic nanoparticles in the PV's active layer to trap the incident optical wave into the photovoltaic cell. The presented work investigates the design of PV with both structures of conical and cylindrical metallic nanoparticles through studying their extinction cross-sections and electric field distributions. Also, the impact of these nanoparticles in silicon PVs on the optical absorption enhancement is investigated. The figure of merit is calculated to compare the presented designs and their performance improvement compared to the conventional PVs. Furthermore, the current density–voltage characteristic of the proposed plasmonic PVs is studied. Also, the impacts of the parameters of the proposed plasmonic PV on J-V characteristics and optical absorption are investigated where all these simulations are done for silicon (Si) PV. © 2020 Elsevier GmbH