Suppression of surface and Auger recombination by formation and control of radial junction in silicon microwire solar cells

Abstract Black silicon (b-Si) with nanotextures is a promising light-trapping scheme for potentially achieving high conversion efficiency at reduced manufacturing cost in crystalline-silicon solar cells. However, the inherently high aspect-ratio and tiny feature size of the nanostructures are subject to severe surface (large surface areas) and Auger recombination (worse doping profile). These will abate the cost values of b-Si since one has to adopt a comprise strategy of applying shallow nanotextures with antireflection and passivation layers. Here, we show that silicon microwire solar cells featuring well-defined radial junctions can extensively suppress both surface and Auger recombination by providing excellent all-around electrical field. The radially doped silicon micropillar devices even show an internal quantum efficiency as good as that of planar substrate and their measured minority carrier lifetimes become nearly independent of total surface area. A great reduction in short-circuit current density loss was further identified as the junction abruptly changed from a fully diffused to a core-shell configuration, manifesting the powerful effectiveness of radial p-n + junction on the suppression of Auger recombination. Furthermore, silicon microwire solar cell with a radial junction demonstrates 37% increase in efficiency compared with the reference cell, suggesting a feasible strategy towards high-efficiency solar devices.