Chien-Chang CHAO, Chih-Ming WANG¹, Yia-Chung CHANG², and Jenq-Yang CHANG^*

Department of Optics and Photonics, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan 32001, R.O.C.
¹Institute of Opto-electronic Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan 97401, R.O.C.
²Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan 11529, R.O.C.

(Received July 15, 2008; Accepted March 23, 2009)

A plasmonic multilayer structure (PMS) is proposed for photovoltaic cells with an ultrathin active layer that is 30 nm amorphous Si (α-Si). The optical properties of the PMS are analyzed by rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. Using the PMS, the incident light can be trapped into localized surface plasmon (LSP) and then the localized surface plasmon induces the surface plasmon (SP) that propagates transversely within the α-Si layer. Compared with the indium tin oxide (ITO)/α-Si/Ag structure, the photon number absorbed by PMS increase 28.7% while a normal incident transverse magnetic (TM) polarization wave is applied.

Key words: plasmonic multilayer, amorphous silicon, photovoltaic, surface plasmons

^*E-mail address: jychang@dop.ncu.edu.tw