Applying dielectrophoresis on silver nanowires alignment and assembly to enhance the efficiency of plasmonic silicon solar cells

The enhancement effects for solar cell are examined on the plasmonic properties of Ag nanowires (AgNWs) arrays, which fabricated by dielectrophoresis techniques. AgNWs in 100 nm diameters with aspect ratio (AR) of 100 were assembled into an array between the micrometer spaced electrodes by applying an AC electric field. The simulating results show that the array AgNWs can enhance the localized surface electric field on the silicon surface efficiently. Since, the incident lights can be scattered and trapped in the silicon layers which improves the enhancement of the external quantum efficiency. The optimized result of alignment of AgNWs average angle are 89.17 degree to the electrode edges and 21.98 degree of standard deviation under 100 Vpp, 250 kHz. In addition, the reflectance is 18.4% lower than those without AgNWs ones. The optimized plasmonic solar cells increase efficiency from 7.78% to 8.72%.