Development of new materials for solar cells in Nagoya Institute of Technology

Solar cells with high efficiency and low price have long been desired, however, the commercially available solar cells are still expensive and the efficiencies of them are not high enough yet. A tandem solar cell was fabricated to develop a high-efficiency solar cell, and amorphous carbon solar cells were fabricated to develop a low-price solar cell. An AlGaAs/Si tandem solar cell was successfully fabricated by heteroepitaxial growth of AlGaAs on Si substrate. At first, a p-n junction was formed in Si substrate by the impurity diffusion method. Then, an AlGaAs p-n junction was grown by MOCVD. Since the AlGaAs p-n junction has a graded band gap emitter, the photo-excited minority carriers can be collected efficiently. The energy conversion efficiency of AlGaAs/Si tandem solar cell was 21.4% (AM0) in spite of large lattice mismatch and difference in thermal expansion coefficients between AlGaAs and Si. Solar cells were fabricated by using amorphous carbon films deposited by Ion Beam Sputtering and Pulse Laser Deposition (PLD). The highest efficiency of 1.82% (AM0) was attained with a-C(IBS)/p-C(pyrolysis)/p-Si structure. Solar cells using a-C:H were also fabricated by PLD and Plasma CVD, and the efficiencies of them were 2.1% (AM1.5) and 0.04% (AM0), respectively. Other research activities on solar cells in Nagoya Institute of Technology are briefly mentioned. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.