High-Low Refractive Index Stacks for Broadband Antireflection Coatings for Multijunction Solar Cells

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel broadband antireflection coating design using high-low refractive index stacks for multijunction solar cells, outperforming traditional double-layer coatings without needing new materials.

Contribution

The work proposes a new high-low index multilayer design for broadband antireflection coatings that improves performance over existing methods using only two existing materials.

Findings

High-low index stacks outperform double-layer coatings in simulated current density.

The design maintains performance despite small thickness deviations.

The approach is effective for various multijunction solar cell types.

Abstract

Antireflection coatings are an interesting challenge for multijunction solar cells due to their broadband spectrum absorption and the requirement of current matching of each subcell. A new design for multijunction solar cell antireflection coatings is presented in this work in which alternative high and low index materials are used to minimize the reflection in a broadband (300nm-1800nm). We compared the short circuit current density of high-low refractive index stacks designs with optimum double-layer antireflection coatings by considering two optical materials combinations (MgF2/ZnS and Al2O3/TiO2) for the AM0 and AM1.5D spectra. The calculations demonstrate that for lattice-matched triple-junction solar cells and inverted metamorphic quadruple-junction solar cells, high-low refractive index stacks outperform the optimum double-layer antireflection coatings. The new design philosophy requires no new optical materials because only two materials are used and exhibits excellent performance in broadband spectra. The angle performance of these antireflection coatings is slightly better than classical double-layers whereas the analysis for thickness sensitivity shows that small deviations from deposition targets only slightly impact the performance of antireflection coatings. Finally, some technical solutions for depositing these high-low refractive index multilayers are discussed.