Nanoplasmonics for photovoltaic applications

Plasmonics has become a focus of recent research in photovoltaic applications primarily due to their effects in enhancing the absorption performance of solar cells. In this paper a review of different approaches that have been proposed to integrate plasmonics technologies into solar cells is presented. It has been observed that a range of metallic nanostructures that show plasmon resonance wavelength in the visible and near-infrared regime can be utilized to increase the coupling of light into the solar cell. This is widely used to increase the coupling of light that can be trapped in thin layers of active regions as in thin film technologies. In this review paper, more attention is given to the techniques of fabricating the metallic nanoparticles and the ways to control their plasmon resonance wavelengths. The role of the shape, size, dielectric permittivity of the host and the type of the metallic nanoparticles on tuning the resonance wavelength are analyzed. Furthermore, the cluster of nanoparticles gives different resonance wavelength from the individual nanoparticles due to dipolar coupling among the nanoparticles. In conclusion, we show how the plasmon resonance can be engineered to increase the absorption performance of conventional solar cells.