Lithography Free Process for the Fabrication of Periodic Silicon Micro/Nano-Wire Arrays and Its Light-trapping Properties

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel lithography-free method combining MACE and RIE to fabricate silicon micro/nanowire arrays with controlled sizes, enhancing light-trapping and charge collection for solar cell applications.

Contribution

It introduces a new lithography-free process for creating silicon micro/nanowire arrays with tunable dimensions and demonstrates their superior light-trapping properties.

Findings

Average reflectance as low as 0.22% at 45° incident angle.

Micro/nanowire arrays significantly reduce reflectance compared to planar silicon.

Arrays are promising for low-cost, high-efficiency solar cells.

Abstract

Vertically aligned silicon micro/nanowire arrays of different sizes have been synthesized by combining the modified metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE) and reactive ion etching (RIE) methods. This is a novel lithography-free method to fabricate silicon micro/nanowire arrays. The size of micro/nanowire arrays is controlled by controlling the etching rate and diameter of silica particles. The silicon micro/nanowire geometry can utilize for efficient collection of photo-generated charge carriers from impure silicon wafers, which have a short minority carrier diffusion length also act as a self-antireflection coating layer. For micro/nanowire having average diameters of 40 nm, 330 nm and 950 nm and their corresponding average length 1.12 micron, 1.1 micron, and 1 micron, respectively, the observed average reflectance was 0.22, 0.6 and 0.33 percent at 45-degree incident angle, while the average reflectance was increased up to 4.2, 9.2, and 11 percent, respectively at 75-degree incident angle in the broad range of 300 - 1200 nm of the solar spectrum. The measured average reflectance for these samples is quite low compared to the planar silicon wafer. Thus this geometry is a promising candidate for fabricating low-cost and highly efficient radial junction silicon micro/nanowire arrays based solar cells.