Silver nanoparticle-based anti-reflection coating for solar cells

To reduce the surface reflection loss of the incident sun light in solar cells, an anti-reflection coating (ARC) is typically used. As an alternative, metallic nanoparticles (NPs), which show plasmonic effect and scatter the sun light efficiently at resonance wavelength, have been suggested. The light reflection from NPs-based ARC (hybrid ARC) is highly influenced by shape, size, host medium, volume fraction of NPs and the underneath layers. Herein, we use an analytical model for silver NPs-based hybrid ARC on a substrate and compare it with traditional dielectric based ARC. Our calculations of weighted reflectance from the ARC at various angles of incidence (AOI) show that the hybrid ARC performs better than dielectric based ARC at non-normal AOI. Also, the 80 nm thick hybrid ARC have shown the best wide-angle improvement in ARC performance.