Plasmonic multiple exciton generation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that plasmonic resonance in metallic nanoparticle arrays can significantly enhance multiple exciton generation in solar cells, potentially surpassing traditional efficiency limits.

Contribution

It introduces plasmon-enhanced multiple exciton generation (PMEG) as a novel method to improve solar cell efficiency beyond the Shockley-Queisser limit.

Findings

Efficiency of PMEG increases as semiconductor gap decreases.

GaAs, Si, and Ge systems show progressively higher PMEG efficiency.

Plasmonic resonance tuning is key to optimizing exciton generation.

Abstract

We show that bi-exciton formation can be highly efficient in a solar cell with the semiconductor absorber filled with an array of metallic nanoparticles having plasmonic resonance tuned to the semiconductor gap energy. This process can be viewed as plasmon-enhanced multiple exciton generation (PMEG), with the resulting cell efficiency exceeding the Shockley-Queisser limit. We demonstrate, that efficiency of the PMEG process, increases with decreasing of the semiconductor gap size, and illustrate that by considering in detail three systems with gradually decreasing gap size: GaAs, Si and Ge.