Enhanced plasmonic photovoltaic using embedded novel gear-shaped nanoparticles

In this paper, novel gear-shaped nanoparticles are introduced for the first time to enhance the photovoltaic (PV) efficiency. This has been achieved via increasing the overall power absorption by the PV semiconductor material in both visible and near-infrared ranges. The modes of the new gear-shaped nanoparticles are investigated. A parametric study has been performed which demonstrates how the design parameters of the proposed nanoparticles can be engineered for best overall power absorption within a Si surrounding medium. A figure of merit (FoM) is defined that takes into account all objectives. An optimization technique is applied to obtain the optimum set of the gear’s dimensions, penetration depth, and periodicity for the maximum possible FoM. The optimum gear-shaped nanoparticles design offers 48% enhancement in the FoM if compared with a bare Si block with no nanoparticles and 7% enhancement over the conventional disk-shaped nanoparticles. The enhancement gained by the embedded gear-shaped nanoparticles on the J-V characteristics of the PV is also studied, and the effects of changing the dimensions and the position of nanoparticles on the J-V characteristics enhancement are investigated. © 2018 Optical Society of America.