Photovoltaic device INDEX

Nonetheless, owing to its temperature stability, dopabUity and widely tunable optical behavior, amorphous SiC doped with hydrogen (a-SiC H) has been investigated for its application in photovoltaic devices. One of several structural renderings of amorphous SiC is shown in Figure 11.9. In this case, the refractive index can be varied from 2.3 to 3.7, and the band gap from 2.4 to 2.0eV, simply by altering a few parameters of the plasma-enhanced CVD technique that is used to deposit an amorphous silicon carbide layer with low defect density onto, for example, a substrate of RSiC. Attention has also been focused on the surface passivation performance of layers deposited on crystalline siUcon. Indeed,... 

As the molecular-scale heterogeneity of the active layer greatly influences the power conversion efficiency, it is fundamentally important to identify and control the structural and optical properties and their relation to the function of a photovoltaic device. Ellipsometry is especially useful in determining the complex index of refraction and layer thickness, as well as structural details in thin-film geometry [69-72]. This information is needed to calculate the internal optical electric field distribution and the resulting photocurrent action spectra with respect to the efficiency of thin-film devices [66]. 

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