A microscopic description of light induced defects in amorphous silicon solar cells

Abstract

Using a combination of quantum and classical computational approaches, we model the electronic structure in amorphous silicon in order gain understanding of the microscopic atomic configurations responsible for light induced degradation of solar cells. We demonstrate that regions of strained silicon bonds could be as important as dangling bonds for creating traps for charge carriers. Further, our results show that defects are preferentially formed when a region in the amorphous silicon contains a hole and a light-induced excitation. These results agree with the puzzling dependencies on temperature, time, and pressure observed experimentally.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• The SIESTA method for ab initio order-N materials simulation
• Efficient index handling of multidimensional periodic boundary conditions
• Energy landscape of relaxed amorphous silicon
• Hydrogen dynamics and light-induced structural changes in hydrogenated amorphous silicon

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Hole Localization in Molecular Crystals From Hybrid Density Functional Theory
• Stress effects on the Raman spectrum of an amorphous material: theory and experiment on a-Si:H
• Enlightening the atomistic mechanisms driving self-diffusion of amorphous Si during annealing
• Hydrogen-induced degradation dynamics in silicon heterojunction solar cells via machine learning
• Computational generation of voids in $a$-Si and $a$-Si:H by cavitation at low density
• Role of Heterogeneities in Staebler-Wronski Effect