1.7eV Al0.2Ga0.8As solar cells epitaxially grown on silicon by SSMBE using a superlattice and dislocation filters

Arthur Onno; Jiang Wu; Qi Jiang; Siming Chen; Mingchu Tang; Yurii Maidaniuk; Mourad Benamara; Yuriy I. Mazur; Gregory J. Salamo; Nils-Peter Harder; Lars Oberbeck; Huiyin Liu

doi:10.1117/12.2208950

14 March 2016 1.7eV Al_0.2Ga_0.8As solar cells epitaxially grown on silicon by SSMBE using a superlattice and dislocation filters

Arthur Onno, Jiang Wu, Qi Jiang, Siming Chen, Mingchu Tang, Yurii Maidaniuk, Mourad Benamara, Yuriy I. Mazur, Gregory J. Salamo, Nils-Peter Harder, Lars Oberbeck, Huiyin Liu

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9743, Physics, Simulation, and Photonic Engineering of Photovoltaic Devices V; 974310 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2208950
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2016, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Lattice-mismatched 1.7eV Al_0.2Ga_0.8As photovoltaic solar cells have been monolithically grown on Si substrates using Solid Source Molecular Beam Epitaxy (SSMBE). As a consequence of the 4%-lattice-mismatch, threading dislocations (TDs) nucleate at the interface between the Si substrate and III-V epilayers and propagate to the active regions of the cell. There they act as recombination centers and degrade the performances of the cell. In our case, direct AlAs/GaAs superlattice growth coupled with InAlAs/AlAs strained layer superlattice (SLS) dislocation filter layers (DFLSs) have been used to reduce the TD density from 1×10⁹cm^-2 to 1(±0.2)×10⁷cm^-2. Lattice-matched Al0.2Ga0.8As cells have also been grown on GaAs as a reference. The best cell grown on silicon exhibits a Voc of 964mV, compared with a V_oc of 1128mV on GaAs. Fill factors of respectively 77.6% and 80.2% have been calculated. Due to the lack of an anti-reflection coating and the non-optimized architecture of the devices, relatively low J_sc have been measured: 7.30mA.cm^-2 on Si and 6.74mA.cm^-2 on GaAs. The difference in short-circuit currents is believed to be caused by a difference of thickness between the samples due to discrepancies in the calibration of the MBE prior to each growth. The bandgap-voltage offset of the cells, defined as E_g/q-V_oc, is relatively high on both substrates with 736mV measured on Si versus 572mV on GaAs. The non-negligible TD density partly explains this result on Si. On GaAs, non-ideal growth conditions are possibly responsible for these suboptimal performances.

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Arthur Onno, Jiang Wu, Qi Jiang, Siming Chen, Mingchu Tang, Yurii Maidaniuk, Mourad Benamara, Yuriy I. Mazur, Gregory J. Salamo, Nils-Peter Harder, Lars Oberbeck, and Huiyin Liu "1.7eV Al_0.2Ga_0.8As solar cells epitaxially grown on silicon by SSMBE using a superlattice and dislocation filters", Proc. SPIE 9743, Physics, Simulation, and Photonic Engineering of Photovoltaic Devices V, 974310 (14 March 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2208950

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