Role of silver nanoparticles deposition temperature on a-Si/μc-Si thin-film solar cell light absorption

Silver nanoparticles thin films are used for effective light trapping of thin film silicon solar cells. In this work, we demonstrate the effect of the substrate temperature of silver nanoparticles thin film deposited upon a-Si:H/μc-Si:H thin film using Physical Vapor Deposition PVD technique, where a silver layer was deposited on a p-i-n junction on ITO glass substrate at different substrate temperatures. The morphology of the silver layer was studied by FESEM and atomic force microscope AFM and found to be consisting of nano-sized particles. The performance of a-Si:H/μc-Si:H thin film solar cell was evaluated by current-voltage measurements and optical absorption. It was observed that the silver nanoparticles size and surface roughness increase with increasing the substrate temperature, however the surface roughness increases only till TS = 200 °C and remains constant at 88 nm. The maximum efficiency was achieved (7.38%) for the substrate temperature of 200 °C. For this condition, the maximum absorption achieved was (74% at 300 nm) and (17% at 500–800 nm, respectively). (paper)