Light harvesting enhancement in solar cells with quasicrystalline plasmonic structures

Solar cells are important in the area of renewable energies. Since it is expensive to produce solar-grade silicon [Electrochem. Soc. Interface 17, 30 (2008)], especially thin-film solar cells are interesting. However, the efficiency of such solar cells is low. Therefore, it is important to increase the efficiency. The group of Polman has shown that a periodic arrangement of metal particles is able to enhance the absorbance of light [Nano Lett. 11, 1760 (2011)]. However, a quasicrystalline arrangement of the metal particles is expected to enhance the light absorbance independent of the incident polar and azimuthal angles due to the more isotropic photonic bandstructure. In this paper, we compare the absorption enhancement of a quasiperiodic photonic crystal to that of a periodic photonic crystal. We indeed find that the absorption enhancement for the quasicrystalline arrangement shows such an isotropic behavior. This implies that the absorption efficiency of the solar cell is relatively constant during the course of the day as well as the year. This is particularly important with respect to power distribution, power storage requirements, and the stability of the electric grid upon massive use of renewable energy. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America