Effective recombination velocity of textured surfaces

Kanglin Xiong, Shulong Lu, Desheng Jiang, Jianrong Dong, and Hui Yang Citation: Applied Physics Letters 96, 193107 (2010); doi: 10.1063/1.3396078 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3396078 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/96/19?ver=pdfcov Published by the AIP Publishing

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APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS 96, 193107 2010

Effective recombination velocity of textured surfaces

Kanglin Xiong,1,2 Shulong Lu,1 Desheng Jiang,2 Jianrong Dong,1 and Hui Yang1,2,a
1

Suzhou Institute of Nano-tech and Nano-bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou 215125, Peoples Republic of China 2 Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, Peoples Republic of China

Received 18 February 2010; accepted 26 March 2010; published online 11 May 2010 Surface texturization is an effective way to enhance the absorption of light for optoelectronic devices but it also aggravates the surface recombination by enlarging the surface area. In order to evaluate the inuence of texture structures on the surface recombination, an effective surface recombination velocity is dened which is assumed to have an equivalent recombination effect on a at surface. Based on numerical and analytical calculation, the dependences of effective surface recombination on the pattern geometry, the surface recombination velocity, and the diffusion length are analyzed. 2010 American Institute of Physics. doi:10.1063/1.3396078 Surface texturization which introduces random or periodic submicron structures to the surface is efcient on absorbing broadband and divergent light.13 It has been widely employed to solar cells4 and photodetectors5 to promote the quantum efciency and adopted by light emitting diodes6 to raise the light extraction efciency. Though beneting in the optical aspects, surface texturization may be harmful to the devices by enhancing surface recombination. When the size of the surface structure is reduced to the nanometer scale, surface recombination can be very detrimental to an optoelectronic device, such as the degradation of external quantum efciency of black silicon solar cells7 and the reduction in lifetime of excess carriers.8 A widely accepted but perhaps somehow oversimplied understanding is that the increased total area of the textured material will result in an increased surface recombination. To improve performance of devices such as black silicon solar cells, a thorough investigation on recombination of textured surfaces is needed. In this letter, an effective surface recombination velocity Seff is introduced to evaluate the effects of the surface recombination for several periodically textured surfaces, and the dependences of Seff are theoretically analyzed on the surface geometry, the surface recombination velocity, and the carrier diffusion length. Assuming the same carrier transport property in the texture and the bulk material, three two-dimensional surface texture geometries, schematically shown in Fig. 1, will be investigated with the at surface as the reference. The decay process of excess carriers in a semiconductor lm follows the law of continuity described as follows:9 dn/dt = Dn n/ , Dnn i = S in , 1a 1b Supposing a uniform excess carrier distribution in the layer material, an effective lifetime eff which takes surface recombination into consideration can be dened and expressed as10,11 1/eff = 1/ + Si/H ,
i

H is the thickness of the layer. A uniform carrier density solution is self-consistent if the effective diffusion length is much larger than the thickness of the layer. This means eff should be much greater than the transit time H2 / 2D across the layer.10 However, eff is affected by carrier recombination both in the bulk and at the surfaces and is not explicit enough to express the surface recombination. Therefore the effective surface recombination velocity Seff is dened as follows: Seff = SiAi/Az=0 ,
i

3a

where Ai is the area of surface i. It means that all the recombination at different surface conditions can be set equivalent to the different quantities of effective recombination velocity at a plane z = 0, as shown in Fig. 1. With carrier distribution taken into consideration, the effective surface recombination velocity Seff can be written as follows:

where n denotes the excess carrier density and it is a function of time t and position, is the lifetime of the excess carrier in the bulk, D the diffusion coefcient, and Si the surface recombination velocity of the surface i with a normal of n i. Equation 1b denes the geometrical boundary condition.
a

Electronic mail: hyang2006@sinano.ac.cn.

FIG. 1. Color online Schematic diagram of periodic structures with different surface textures, a at surface also shown for reference. Occupied-space ratio is 99% for rectangular texture. Only top surface recombination is considered as highlighted by the dashed lines.

0003-6951/2010/96 19indicated /193107/3/$30.00 96is , 193107-1 2010 American InstituteDownloaded of Physics to IP: This article is copyrighted as in the article. Reuse of AIP content subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. 103.27.8.43 On: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:19:50

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FIG. 2. Color online Decay curves of average excess carrier density with time for the at and differently textured surfaces. The texture period has a width of 200 nm and a height of 400 nm. No SR represents S = 0.

Seff =

SndA/

ndA .

3b

z=0

and triangle textures, and 0.112 ns for the rectangle texture. The relative standard uncertainties are no more than 1% for all the tted results. Surface texturization really decreases the effective carrier lifetime compared to the at surface. The dependence of Seff on the height h of the texture structures is shown in Fig. 3a with a width of 250 nm. It can be seen that, Seff is linear to h when h is less than 400 nx, z = n0A+ expz/LZ + A exp z/LZ nm, and this can be understood with Eq. 3b. When h is small, the carrier distribution is uniform and Seff is propor4 B+ expx/LX + B exp x/LX , tional to the surface area, so Seff has a linear relationship with h. When h is larger than 400 nm, Seff varies slower with where A, B, and n0 are position-independent parameters increasing h. This is caused by the lower density of excess and LZ and LX are nominal diffusion length. For a texture carrier near the surface limited by the diffusion process. Our unit with height of h and width of w, A, B, and n0 is analytical model is consistent with numerical results in terms dened by the following: the carrier density n0 , 0, the of the trend, and it also predicts that Seff will level off beyond nominal recombination velocity SZ for the front surface z certain h. = h, and SX for the two side surfaces x = w / 2. Therefore, As the width of the texture unit decreases, the total surwith values of LZ, LX, SZ, and SX appropriately assigned, face area increases reciprocally. So Seff will be roughly linear nx , z will provide a good approximation to the excess carto 1 / w as shown in Fig. 3b for a texture height of 400 nm. rier distribution in the texture unit. Our model indicates that Seff = C / w + 1 S when w is much For the numerical calculation, the value of D is taken as smaller than the diffusion length, where C is a tting param200 cm2 / s, S is 1 m / ns, is 0.2 ns. Then, the bulk diffusion length L is 2 m. The layer thickness H is 1 m. So eter and is determined to be 0.49 m with a standard error eff should exceed H2 / 2D whose value is 0.05 ns to ensure of 0.01 m. Figure 3c shows the dependence of Seff on S for differthe analysis is valid. The initial carrier density is uniform ent texture shapes with w of 200 nm and h of 400 nm as well with value of 1017 cm3. For the analytical model, the paas for a at surface. For the at surface, Seff is proportional to rameters are assigned to be LX = 2.8 L, LZ = 0.5 L, SX S and the slope of the SeffS curve is about 0.9, which is = 0.6 S, and SZ = 1.1 S. Figure 2 shows the numerical result of the excess carrier close to the expected value of 1. For textured surfaces, Seff decaying curves of layers with different surface structures. varies linearly with S when S is less than 3 m / ns, and the eff obtained by tting the curves is 0.198 ns for the at slopes are about three independent of the texture shapes, insurface without surface recombination, 0.169 ns for the at dicating that the carrier distribution affects the Seff, so the surface with surface recombination, 0.123 ns of for the ellipse area is to IP: understanding that Seff is proportional to the total This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded
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The numerical and analytical calculation of Seff for three typical textured structures shown in Fig. 1 will be carried out and discussed below. For the numerical case, Eq. 1a is solved by nite element method. eff is calculated by tting the average carrier density decay with n0 expt / eff. Then, Seff is calculated using Eqs. 2 and 3a. For the analytical case, Seff will be obtained from the steady condition that the excess carriers ow from the semiconductor layer into the texture structure at a constant rate across the z = 0 plane. In this case, the analytically approximation of excess carrier distribution has to be made in order to calculate the Seff using Eq. 3b. Considering one period of rectangular surface structures, the approximated excess carrier distribution function consists of two independent components varying exponentially along x and z directions, i.e., along the texture period length and perpendicular the device surface, respectively, as follows:

FIG. 3. Color online a The dependences of the effective surface recombination velocity Seff on: a the height of texture unit for w of 250 nm; b the reciprocity of the width 1 / w of texture unit with a height of 400 nm; c the surface recombination S; and d the diffusion length L.

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oversimplied. In addition, owing to low excess carrier density in the surface region, Seff increases slower when S is larger. The discrepancy at large S between analytical and numerical results is attributed to analytical approximation of the carrier distribution. Since Seff depends on the excess carrier distribution in the surface region, a small carrier diffusion length L leads to a lower excess carrier concentration in the surface region, therefore a small Seff according to Eq. 3b. But for extremely short L, eff H2 / 2D, Seff cannot be simulated numerically. Inversely, excess carriers can reach the textured surface easily for large L, so Seff tends to saturate as shown in Fig. 3d. Based on the above results, the surface recombination effect on surface-textured optoelectronic devices can be analyzed with Seff. The charge collection probability12 in texture structures can be calculated using the analytical approximation function of the excess carrier distribution. For a given light distribution, the internal quantum efciency of the black surface solar cells and the photodetectors can be obtained. In conclusion, an effective surface recombination velocity Seff has been introduced to evaluate the surface recombination for different surface conditions. Seff is proportional to the total surface area and the surface recombination velocity for a uniform excess carrier distribution in the texture. The material properties such as the diffusion length and the sur-

face recombination velocity can affect excess carrier density in the surface region, and in turn inuence Seff. This work was supported in part by National Basic Research Program Grant No. 2007CB936701, the Knowledge Innovation Project of CAS Grant No. KGCX2-YW-324, and the International Cooperation Project of MOST Grant No. 2009DFR60420.
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