Gallium phosphide solar cells for multi-juntion systems

Gallium Phosphide (GaP) is a good candidate for a high band gap solar cell in a multi-junction solar cell system due to its proper band gap (2.26ev), well developed technology, and high carrier mobility. High energy gap solar cell plays a very important role in multi-junction systems. In this paper, theoretical simulation work has been done for GaP solar cells by PC-1D software. High quality GaP epitaxial layers have been grown on GaP (100) and (111) substrates via liquid phase epitaxial (LPE) method. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) have been used to characterize the surface morphology and quality of the growth layer, respectively. I-V measurement has been used to test the performance of GaP solar cells. The open circuit voltage, which is the most important feature of GaP solar cells, is 1.33V under simulated one sun illumination in our lab.