Design and development of silver nanoparticles to reduce the reflection loss of solar cells

In this paper, we investigate the design and fabrication of silver nano-particles using thin film deposition in conjunction with thermal annealing. We also predict the performance of conical shaped subwavelength grating structure developed using dry and isotropic etching of semiconductor substrates. Several silver (Ag) thin films of different thicknesses are deposited on semiconductor substrates and annealed at different temperatures. Adequate nanoparticle distribution of 200 nm average diameter is successfully fabricated on Si and GaAs substrates using 10 nm thick Ag thin films annealed at 523 K. Moreover, the Finite-Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method is used to optimize the grating height and period size of the SWG structure for minimizing the reflection of semiconductor devices over the solar spectrum.