Hybrid nanocone forests with high absorption in full-solar spectrum for solar cell applications

In this work, hybrid nanocone forests (HNFs) with high absorption in full-solar-spectrum are fabricated based on a plasma repolymerization technique. The HNFs combine light trapping effect of the nanocone forests with surface plasmon resonance effect of the metallic nanoparticles, thus can achieve an optimized absorption larger than 80% in the full-solar spectrum (i.e. 200-2500nm). Besides, with the hybrid nanostructures, the absorption decrease around the Si bandgap width can be narrowed greatly, while the normalized utilization efficiency of solar radiation can be increased. Therefore, usage of the HNFs as a texture structure in solar cells to obtain higher conversion efficiencies is foreseeable.