Plasmonic silicon solar cells using titanium nitride: a comparative study

Abstract. Plasmonic materials, especially silver, are widely used to increase efficiency of solar cells due to their ability to localize the light in nanoscale. This tight confinement increases the absorption of a thin film solar cell. However, these materials are expensive and increase the cost/watt of the solar cell. Thus, finding an abundant and cheap material with a comparable plasmonic effect can dramatically reduce solar cell cost by enabling the use of ultrathin active layers. In this work, we investigate TiN as an alternative cheap and abundant plasmonic material. TiN is also more CMOS compatible. Several TiN plasmonic solar cell configurations are studied and analyzed. These studies show that the TiN plasmonic solar cell has a comparable performance for back side plasmonic configuration.

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