Absorption enhancement in thin film solar cells with bilayer silver nanoparticle arrays

In this paper, a systematic design and analysis of thin film crystalline silicon solar cells decorated with bilayer silver nanoparticles with different particle dimensions is presented. The particles are located on the rear of the solar cell. Using numerical simulations, we showed that the light absorption is enhanced when the particle radii of the upper layer Ag NPs is less than that of the lower. Moreover, our proposed structure showed a 9.97% increase in short-circuit current density and a 9.94% increase in intergraded quantum efficiency across the solar spectrum compared with the optimized counterpart decorated with uniform Ag NPs. (paper)