Concept to devices: From plasmonic light trapping to upscaled plasmonic solar modules [Invited]

The concept of using plasmonic nanostructures to manage light in solar cells has offered an unprecedented potential for dramatically increased solar energy conversion efficiency that breaks the previously predicated efficiency limit. In the past decade, intensive research efforts have been focused on this field. However, nanoplasmonic solar cells still remained in the laboratory level. To facilitate the transformation of the nanoplasmonic solar cell concept to a viable high-efficiency technology solution for the solar industry, it is essential to address key fundamental as well as practical challenges including the detrimental absorption of metallic nanostructures, narrow-band absorption enhancement in the active layer, the high cost and scarcity of noble metals, and the expensive and complicated plasmonic nanomaterial fabrication and integration methods. In this paper, after a brief review of our main results in nanoplasmonic solar cells, we present our strategies for using innovative photonic methods to overcome these challenges and demonstrate a large-area (173  cm²) broadband plasmonic thin-film solar minimodule with an efficiency of 9.5% resulting from the enhanced plasmonic light scattering enabled by silver lumpy nanoparticles with an ultralow nanoparticle coverage density of 5%.