There Are Two Distinct Photon Gases Present Inside Every Solar Cell
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| _version_ | 1866909203084345344 |
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| author | Yablonovitch, Eli Omair, Zunaid |
| author_facet | Yablonovitch, Eli Omair, Zunaid |
| contents | It has gradually been recognized that incoming sunlight can be trapped within a high refractive index semiconductor, n~3.5, owing to the narrow 16degree escape cone. The solar light inside a semiconductor is 4n^2 times brighter than incident sunlight. This is called light trapping and has increased the theoretical and practical efficiency of solar panels. But there is a second photon gas of equal importance that has been overlooked. Inside every forward-biased solar cell there is a gas of infrared luminescence photons, also trapped by total internal reflection. We introduce the idea of super-equilibrium, when the luminescence photon gas freely exchanges energy with the two quasi-Fermi levels.
Nonetheless, the loss of a single photon from either gas is equivalent to the loss of a precious minority carrier. Therefore optical modeling & design becomes equally important as electron-hole modeling in high efficiency solar cells. It becomes possible to approach the idealistic Shockley-Queisser limit, by proper material selection and design of the solar cell optics. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08835 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | There Are Two Distinct Photon Gases Present Inside Every Solar Cell Yablonovitch, Eli Omair, Zunaid Optics Other Condensed Matter It has gradually been recognized that incoming sunlight can be trapped within a high refractive index semiconductor, n~3.5, owing to the narrow 16degree escape cone. The solar light inside a semiconductor is 4n^2 times brighter than incident sunlight. This is called light trapping and has increased the theoretical and practical efficiency of solar panels. But there is a second photon gas of equal importance that has been overlooked. Inside every forward-biased solar cell there is a gas of infrared luminescence photons, also trapped by total internal reflection. We introduce the idea of super-equilibrium, when the luminescence photon gas freely exchanges energy with the two quasi-Fermi levels. Nonetheless, the loss of a single photon from either gas is equivalent to the loss of a precious minority carrier. Therefore optical modeling & design becomes equally important as electron-hole modeling in high efficiency solar cells. It becomes possible to approach the idealistic Shockley-Queisser limit, by proper material selection and design of the solar cell optics. |
| title | There Are Two Distinct Photon Gases Present Inside Every Solar Cell |
| topic | Optics Other Condensed Matter |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08835 |