Performance degradation in aSi/cSi Heterjunction Solar Cells by Glassy Dynamics

aSi/cSi heterojunction solar cells hold the efficiency world record around 27%, yet their market penetration is delayed. One concern is the presence of an amorphous Si layer that some suspect may speed up the degradation of their performance. To address this concern, we developed a structural simulation platform that is capable of capturing extremely slow degradation processes in aSi. One of our main results is the implementation of the nudged elastic band method to capture the defect generation time scales, which we showed is capable of capturing a time scale distribution that stretches over 8 orders of magnitude.