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Challenges in advanced characterization techniques for high V oc thin‐film tandem solar cells
Author(s) -
Ventosinos Federico,
Fakes Boulos,
Johnson Erik V.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
physica status solidi (a)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.532
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1862-6319
pISSN - 1862-6300
DOI - 10.1002/pssa.201532948
Subject(s) - tandem , amorphous silicon , silicon , amorphous solid , materials science , optoelectronics , characterization (materials science) , band gap , open circuit voltage , solar cell , nanotechnology , engineering physics , voltage , crystalline silicon , electrical engineering , chemistry , physics , crystallography , engineering , composite material
In this work we focus on two techniques developed to extract the individual open circuit voltages ( V oc ) of tandem devices, as well as their sub‐cell current–voltage ( I – V ) characteristics. These were developed to work on the micromorph cell, the subcells of which have only a limited region of overlapping photoresponse due to the very different band gaps of its constituent cells, which allows for selective illumination. However, it is not known if such techniques will work in tandem structures consisting of high V oc structures (compared to the micromorph device), such as combinations of hydrogenated amorphous silicon oxide (a‐SiO:H), polymorphous silicon (pm‐Si:H), and amorphous silicon (a‐Si:H) in a‐SiO:H/pmSi:H a‐Si:H/pm‐Si:H device stacks. These novel structures have proven to suffer from less light induced degradation (LID), which is one of the main drawbacks of devices using a‐Si:H. The presence of similar band gaps (difference of less than 150 mV in both cases) and overlapping external quantum efficiencies (EQEs) above 500 nm implies that some of the hypotheses used may not be valid for high V oc devices. In this work we show the difficulties that arise when using these characterization techniques in such devices.