Impact of the size of silver nanoparticle integrated in an ARC based on silicon

Abstract

The controlled use of surface plasmon resonances in metallic nanostructures has attracted considerable interest in several areas, including photovoltaic devices. The diffusion of metal nanoparticles is a well-known phenomenon and has long been debated. The relative extent of absorption and dispersion depends on the size of the nanoparticles. The deposition of metal nanoparticles on the surface of the photovoltaic cell makes it possible to increase the absorption of the incident light and to reduce the optical losses. The most commonly used metal nanoparticle deposition techniques are: Bottom-up and Top-Down. In this paper, we study the effect of the size of silver nanoparticles (np-Ag) integrated in an antireflection layer of silicon nitride. The plasmonic effect converts scattered ultraviolet rays (absorbed by np-Ag) into visible radiation. The use of the DDSCAT software has made it possible to calculate the dispersion and absorption of electromagnetic waves by nanoscale targets with arbitrary geometries using the dipole discrete approximation (DDA). DDA is used to model these particles arranged on a cubic lattice, as interactive sets of dipoles. The variance in np-Ag size allowed us to determine the optimal size that absorbs maximum UV radiation. The simulation results show that the optimal size of np-Ag is 110 nm.

Keywords

• Solar cell
• Crystal silicon
• Nanoparticule
• Down-converters
• Plasmon