Combined Experimental and Modeling Analysis for the Development of Optical Materials Suitable to Enhance the Implementation of Plasmonic-Enhanced Luminescent Down-Shifting Solutions on Existing Silicon-Based Photovoltaic Devices

The development of highly efficient solar collectors requires modulating the light interactions with the semiconducting materials. Incorporating luminescent species and metal nanoparticles within a semitransparent polymeric material (e.g., polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)) leads to the formation of a plasmon-enhanced luminescent down-shifting (PLDS) layer, which offers a retrofittable approach toward expanding the wavelength range over which the conversion process can effectively occur. Adding antireflection coatings (ARCs) further controls the spectral response. However, with each additional component comes additional loss pathways. In this study, the losses related to light interactions with the PMMA and the ARCs have been investigated theoretically using a transfer matrix method and experimentally validated. Two proposed architectures were considered, and the deviations between the optical response of each iteration helped to establish the design considerations. The proposed structure-enhanced (SE) designs generated a predicted enhancement of 37 to 62% for the collection performance of a pristine monocrystalline-silicon solar cell, as inferred through the short-circuit current density (Jsc). The results revealed the synergies among the SE-design components, demonstrating that the spectral response of the SEs, containing a thin polymer framework and an ARC, can be tuned to minimize the reflections, leading to the solar energy conversion enhancement.