Antireflective Nanostructures for Solar Cells

Photon management is a technique to precisely control and enhance the light at the active layer via increasing light-matter interaction, which can significantly enhance the efficiency of solar cells. Recently, much effort has been devoted to nanostructures applied to solar cells due to their nanoscaled dimension and unique architectures. The nanostructures show interesting interaction with light, which substantially differ from that of bulk materials, because their dimension is comparable with the incident wavelength. It has been reported that controlling light using nanostructures theoretically allows the solar cells to achieve an efficiency to 50–70 %, breaking Shockley-Queisser limit (Polman and Atwater in Nat Mater 11:174–177, 2012 [1]). Moreover, the radial p-n junction design of nanostructures allows photocarriers easily diffuse to the p-n junction interface along the radial direction and be effectively extracted. Therefore, employment of nanostructures provides intriguing potential not only in optical but also in electrical enhancements for solar cells applications. Here, we discussed recent progress in antireflection (AR) nanostructures for solar cells.