Optimization of Plasmon-Enhanced Thin-Film Heterojunction Solar Cells

In this paper, we optimize the size and position of silver hemispherical nanoparticles arranged in a regular array embedded in a thin-film heterojunction solar cell. The metallic nanoparticles are added in order to improve solar cell efficiency by exploiting the phenomenon of plasmon resonance. A finite-element code has been employed to compute the light scattered from the device and the optimization was performed at first by means of a genetic algorithm and then by means of the parallel self-adaptive low–high evaluation evolutionary algorithm.