Influence of a Gold Seed in Transparent V2Ox/Ag/V2Ox Selective Contacts for Dopant-Free Silicon Solar Cells

Dielectric/metal/dielectric structures based on vanadium pentoxide with a thin silver interlayer have been optimized to replace traditional transparent electrodes. As would be expected, there is a tradeoff in the metal thickness to achieve high transparency and low sheet resistance simultaneously. It has been demonstrated that an ultra-thin gold seed prevents the tendency of silver to form clusters. This wetting effect reduces the metal thickness needed to form a continuous film, which leads to a higher averaged transmittance and very low sheet resistance. On the other hand, vanadium pentoxide on silicon forms a high-quality hole-selective contact. Thus, these structures can be used as an all-in-one transparent electrode and selective contact for a new kind of heterojunction solar cells. This concept has been proved in a 13.3% efficient solar cell fabricated on n-type silicon wafers. Besides being dopant-free, the complete fabrication route did not require any sputtered transparent electrode.