A path to implement optimized randomly textured surfaces for solar cells

Randomly textured surfaces are nowadays routinely integrated into solar cells. Nonetheless, their performance is still not optimal. This became obvious while comparing their performance to optimized surfaces. Thus far, however, these optimized surfaces suffer from being either impossible to implement or only with expensive top-down nanofabrication technologies not suitable for large scale wafers. Here, we suggest a different approach to achieve optimized randomly textured surfaces. It exploits a self-assembled monolayer of spheres with a carefully balanced size distribution to define the random texture. Existing solar cells are outperformed with such realistic textures by up to 26%.