Enhanced Photovoltaic Performances of Graphene/Si Solar Cells by Insertion of an MoS2 Thin Film

TL;DR

This study enhances graphene/Si solar cell efficiency by inserting a CVD-grown MoS2 layer, achieving 11.1% efficiency through optimized layer configurations, leveraging MoS2's passivation and charge transport properties.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates a novel approach of inserting a MoS2 thin film into graphene/Si solar cells to significantly improve their photovoltaic performance.

Findings

Photovoltaic efficiency reached 11.1% with optimized layers.

MoS2 layer acts as passivation and charge transport layer.

Increasing graphene layers and reducing MoS2 thickness enhances performance.

Abstract

Atomically thin layered materials such as graphene and transition-metal dichalcogenides exhibit great potential as active materials in optoelectronic devices because of their high carrier-transporting properties and strong light-matter interactions. Here, we demonstrated that the photovoltaic performances of graphene/Si Schottky junction solar cells were significantly improved by inserting a chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-grown, large MoS2 thin-film layer. This layer functions as an effective passivation and electron-blocking/hole-transporting layer. We also demonstrated that the photovoltaic properties are enhanced with increasing number of graphene layers and decreasing thickness of the MoS2 layer. A high photovoltaic conversion efficiency of 11.1% was achieved with the optimized trilayer-graphene/MoS2/n-Si solar cell.