Diffraction gratings have emerged as one of the main strategies for effective light trapping in thin-film solar cells. The simulation of such photonic structures requires computationally intensive 2D or 3D full-wave approaches, which are therefore unfeasible for computer-aided design purposes. This would be even more challenging in view of performing self-consistent coupling with electronic transport models to fully account for carrier collection and carrier-photon interactions. In this work this problem has been addressed by means of a novel and computationally efficient multiphysics approach for coupled electrical-optical simulations, based on the multimodal scattering matrix formalism, wherein the grating is modeled by a scattering matrix that can be easily derived from simulations performed by rigorous coupled wave analysis.

Date Published: 27 February 2019
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10913, Physics, Simulation, and Photonic Engineering of Photovoltaic Devices VIII, 109130K (27 February 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2511126

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10913:
Physics, Simulation, and Photonic Engineering of Photovoltaic Devices VIII
Alexandre Freundlich; Laurent Lombez; Masakazu Sugiyama, Editor(s)