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Numerical investigation of energy level strategy for TMO/Si tunneling heterojunction solar cells

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Abstract

A thin film of transition metal oxide (TMO) layer forms a heterojunction configuration with silicon (Si) via dopant-free fabrication process. However, excellent hole selective contact performance of TMO/n-Si heterojunction necessitates a stringent alignment of energy levels. Herein, we studied the level matching strategy of TMO/n-Si heterojunction with four parameters including conduction band (EC), bandgap (Eg), Fermi level (EF) and interface trap concentration (Nt). It is found that the electron affinity (Ea) of TMO determines the relative position of the energy level, and increasing the Ea can increase the open-circuit voltage (VOC) from 426.0 to 742.5 mV. In addition, the energy level bending of the interface can be adjusted by the relative EF position of TMO and n-Si to improve the carrier separation efficiency to increase the short-circuit current density (JSC). Meanwhile, the higher Nt is beneficial to the carrier tunneling transport in the case of EC of TMO being smaller than that of n-Si, which enhances the energy level bending of the interface and improves the solar cells performance. Finally, the MoOx/n-Si heterojunction solar cell is optimized to obtained the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 21.87%.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the reviewers for the valuable suggestion.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 62304125 and 62101310) and the Youth Innovation Team Development Plan of Colleges and Universities in Shandong Province (2022KJ323 and 2023KJ148).

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  1. School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, 255000, China

    Zhongliang Gao, GuiJia Feng, Hui Zhou & Li Ding

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  2. GuiJia Feng
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  4. Li Ding
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ZG contributed design, modeling and calculation in this manuscript, and GF, HZ and LD contributed discussion and writing in this manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhongliang Gao.

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Gao, Z., Feng, G., Zhou, H. et al. Numerical investigation of energy level strategy for TMO/Si tunneling heterojunction solar cells. J Comput Electron (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10825-024-02128-x

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